More about Craemer
And who said ministers were boring? August Friedrich Crämer was born in 1812 in
Kleinlangheim, Franconia and he began his studies at the University of Erlangen in
1830. Influenced by the Burschenschaft Germania movement he was imprisoned due
to his political activism. After being taken prisoner in 1833, he was charged with
treason and jailed while he awaited trial, waiting three years before his case was heard.
His sentence was another three years of prison, which may have been longer had not
one of his professors intervened in 1839.
He entered the Philology Seminary, studied ancient and modern Greek, old and middle High
German, French and English before graduating in 1841. After suffering a devastating illness, he
turned for comfort to the Lutheran religion. He obtained a position as tutor to the son of the Saxon
Duke of Einsiedel where he was deeply admired, and upon the Duke's recommendation in 1843  
procured employment at the house of Lord Lovelace in Devonshire, England, who had been looking
for a German–trained tutor for his children.
Lady Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born in 1815 in
London. She was born Augusta Ada Byron, the first legitimate child of the
poet Lord Byron and his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke. Anne Isabella left
Byron in 1816, taking the infant Ada with her. Ada lived with her mother,
but shared her father's acute interested in mathematics, and she was
privately home schooled in mathematics and science, and taught by a
noted researcher and scientific author of the 19th century named Mary
Somerville who introduced her to Charles Babbage and other great minds.
An active socialite, she married William King, Eighth Baron King, later
First Earl of Lovelace, in 1835 and they had three children. Her social life
included Sir David Brewster (the originator of the kaleidoscope), Charles
Wheatstone, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday.
Ada translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's memoir on Babbage's proposed machine
called the "Analytical Engine" in 1842–1843. She is recognized by historians as the world's first
computer programmer. Unfortunately, in order to finance some of her visionary schemes, Ada took
to disastrously gambling on horses. She was plagued with illnesses and gambling debts, and became
addicted to morphine as a result of her medical treatment . Ada Lovelace died of in 1852 after being
bled to death during a cancer treatment. She was buried next to the father she never knew. In 1953,
her notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished and the engine has now been
acknowledged as an early model for a computer.  The United States Department of Defense honored
Ada Lovelace by naming a programming language 'Ada' after her in 1977.
Unfortunately, her personal beliefs denied of the doctrine of the Trinity, and drifted toward an  
acceptance of Unitarianism. She convinced her husband to accept her position, and they pressured
Crämer to adopt their philosophy but he refused, and his stay with the Lovelace’s ended.
With support of Sir Henry Drummond, a prominent member of the House of Commons, Crämer
went to Oxford in 1843 as an instructor of German. He soon found himself in controversy when he
was pressured to deny Lutheranism, oppose the Reformation and turn to the Church of England.  
Meanwhile, he had read Friedrich Wyneken’s account of the plight of the German Lutherans in
North America. Hearing of Wilhelm Löhe, Crämer went to see Löhe at Neuendettelsau in 1844. It all
went very well.  In 1845, the first group of Löhe's emigrants decided upon Crämer as their pastor.
Crämer needed to be ordained first and recieved permission. On April 4, 1845, Crämer was ordained
On April 20, 1845, they sailed for America. It was on this voyage that Crämer met his future wife,
27 year old Dorothea Benthien from Achim near Bremen. She was in the company of a group of
Lutherans enroute to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Crämer watched her lovingly tend the sick during an
outbreak of fever on the ship and straight-away asked her if she would be willing to join the colonists
as a missionary helper to the Indians, and she replied in the affirmative. They were married upon
their arrival in New York City on June 10, 1845.
By the spring of 1846, Crämer was visiting Indian villages twenty miles away from their homes in
Frankenmuth. Soon, he was visiting three Indian villages a month, normally by foot as far as seventy
miles one way as well as teaching the Indians in school and even in his home.  Crämer baptized
thirty-one Indian children. Sadly, he lost one of his own, a small daughter.
After the fall out between synods, in 1847 Crämer helped form die Deutsche Evangelische
Lutherische Synode von Missouri, Ohio, und Andern Staaten, the Missouri Synod. Crämer served
Frankenmuth until 1850, when the Missouri Synod called him to  the Missouri Synod practical
seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which had been started through the efforts of Loehe, despite pleas
that Frankenmuth needed him desperately. In 1861, he moved with the seminary program to Saint
Louis, Missouri because of the Civil War, and he helped organize a congregation out of Irish and
German immigrants in the section of town called “Minerstown”. He took no salary. In 1875, the
seminary was transferred to Springfield, Illinois.
In 1881, three of his grown children and two grandchildren died within two months of each other,
devastating his wife whose health soon deteriorated. By 1884, she was dead, too. Another tragedy
was a typhoid epidemic which broke out in 1888 temporarily shutting down the seminary. Many
seminarians contracted the disease. Crämer faithfully served the seminary from 1850 until his death
on May 3, 1891. Three of his eight children became pastors.