Höfeln, Andreas von.

German immigrant family who settled in middle and southern Illinois.

Andreas von Höfeln was a native of Northern Germany (Norden - Hanover) who was born around 1821 and immigrated to the United States through New Orleans in 1848. He was a wheelwright by trade. Charlotte Fischer was born in Nurenburg, Germany, in 1819. She spent her youth in Göppingen and Kircheim-am-Tech, and immigrated to the United States (Peoria, Illinois) around 1851. She met and married Andreas von Höfeln there in 1852, and by 1858 the couple had moved to Washington, Illinois. They had four children, but only the oldest, Alexander, survived. Alexander Andrew Heflin (the name was changed from Höfeln by at least 1881) was born in 1853. He was a telegrapher for the railroads in Kansas in the 1870s and 1880s; he wrote on letterhead from both the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and the Toledo, Peoria, and Warsaw Railway. Heflin wrote to his fiance, teacher Jessie Beathard, from Glasford, Illinois and Emporia, Kansas. They married in 1881, and the two settled in the town of Wenona, Illinois, and raised four children.