Erwin Heinrich Bremer was born in Frohna, Missouri on October 15, 1907. He was baptized on October 27th at Concordia Lutheran Church. There is also a record of his confirmation at that church in 1921.
Before 1930, Erwin moved to a rural area near Wisner, Nebraska. In the 1930 census, we find him as a farm laborer residing with a George Eggers family.
I cannot find a connection between this George Eggers and the Eggers family in Perry County, but it does seem curious.
In 1934, Erwin married Ethel Wendt at Zion Lutheran Church in Wisner, Nebraska. This congregation merged with St. John’s Lutheran Church in Beemer, Nebraska, in 1969.
Erwin died in 1973 and is buried in Hillcrest Cemetery in Norfolk, Nebraska.
What I find interesting is that there are some people on Ancestry.com who seem to think that Erwin was quite active after he died. Here is a portion of a family tree that can be found on Ancestry.com.
According to this record, Erwin was baptized again on July 22nd in 1992…..nineteen years after he died. I know that this is part of the teachings of the Mormon church, but this was a first for me to see this on Ancestry.com. The Mormons do provide great services for people interested in genealogy, but their doctrine is so contrary to that of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. In this case, I am guessing that someone in this Bremer family is a Mormon. Who knows? Maybe Erwin was. I just know that the LCMS teaches that baptism is entirely the work of the Holy Spirit. It is God’s Word when the pastor baptizes “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” that gives the power to a baptism. Lutherans recognizes a baptism that is performed in some other denomination as being valid. A person need not be baptized over and over again. And we believe that once a person is dead, that person can do nothing else to impact their eternal fate.
Or, again, the decision could have been made that, even though he’d been baptized earlier in life, perhaps his family/descendants felt that he needed a “proper” baptism — or a Mormon baptism.
My husband’s family (on his father’s side) is Mormon. I do know that Mormons practice what’s called “Baptism for the Dead” in which a living person stands in as a “proxy” for a deceased family member who was not baptized before death. This was one thing that my father-in-law completely disagreed with, and when he was pressured by his parents and other family members to do this very thing for a family member who had died, he broke away from the Mormon church. Most of his family still practice the Mormon faith (faithfully!), but he never went back.
My point was that this could perhaps be the reason that Erwin shows more a baptism after his death. It could be that family members later in time felt it right to do this for him; maybe he has descendants who were Mormon. Just a thought.
From public trees at Ancestry.com, I found that GeorgeEggers (b. 1902) was son of Gerhard (b. 1865), who was son of Diedrick (b.1830). Gerhard immigrated 1881, about 40 years after our ancestor, Claus Eggers. They don’t show up in our tree but were from Oldenburg, only about 40 miles from Lamstedt and could be distant cousins. However, it seems unlikely the families would have been in touch in 1930.