Edmund Timotheus Gotsch, 1849–1939

Edmund Timotheus Gotsch was the youngest of five children born to Rev. Dr. Georg Moritz Gotsch and his second wife, Louisa Amalie Kirchheim, but he was the fourteenth child of eighteen total. Edmund was born on 27 August 1849 in Ziegelheim, Saxony. Days later, on 2 September, his father baptized Edmund. Serving as baptismal sponsors were Gottlob Eduard Leo (a Doctor of Theology from Waldenburg), and Mrs. Henriette Passig (wife of Julius Leopold Passig who was a pastor and Doctor of Philosophy).

A religious revolt was going on in Saxony and other European countries in the late 1840s. Edmund’s father decided it was time to immigrate to America where the oldest son had settled a year earlier to study for the ministry in Fort Wayne. So, as a very young boy, Edmund sailed on the bark Wieland in 1852 to America with his parents and siblings.

No doubt Edmund first lived in southeast Indiana with his parents, then in Cincinnati with his widowed father and siblings. After Cincinnati, Edmund ended up in St. Louis, where he worked for Concordia Publishing House until his 1925 retirement.

He met Marie C. Pechmann, who was born on 22 January 1851 in St. Louis. A substitute baptismal sponsor to her was Samuel Tirmenstein, who was one of the original 1839 Saxon immigrants to Perry County, Missouri.

Edmund married Marie at Trinity Lutheran Church in Soulard on 10 May 1874. Marie was the oldest of ten children born to Prussian and Saxon-immigrant parents, Heinrich William Pechmann and Maria Seele. Edmund and Marie’s marriage was blessed with eleven children, including two sets of twins. A grandson, Richard Edmund Gotsch Jr., was a teacher as well as a principal and school district superintendent. For his devotion to teaching, Affton schools named a school on Laclede Station Road after him—Gotsch Intermediate School.

Edmund died in St. Louis on 22 April 22 1939. Marie lived only a while longer, dying on 22 December 1941, also in St. Louis. They are buried in Sunset Burial Park in Affton.

Submitted by Cheryl Gross
May 2018

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