The thought occurred to me before that the "conversion" story Lou keeps repeating could have easily been about a Lutheran converting to Catholicism or something of that nature, as it was a BIG DEAL in many places in the US up until a few decades ago.
Church of the Brethren? Looks like an Anabaptist church, not Lutheran.
http://www.gbgcobrethren.org/About_Us.html
"Anabaptists" include Mennonites/Amish, although there are a lot of Anabaptist today churches where the congregants look normal/have normal jobs, but are still fundamentalist christians. There are TONS of people in rural PA who are descendants of Anabaptist settlers. There are also TONS of people in PA with weird Anglicized butchered German surnames that could easily be mistaken for "Jewish" surnames. Immigrants from Germany who came to the US in the 1700-1800s were often illiterate, and when English speaking tax collectors/other bureaucrats recorded their surnames in records, the original German surnames were butchered beyond recognition.
Someone converting from an Anabaptist sect to any other religion would have automatically been a "big deal" in that type of church as they are normally extremely strict about a lot of things, they refuse to do infant baptism, pretty sure alcohol is frowned upon, huge families, they often have rules concerning technology. Some Anabaptist churches will "shun" or "ban" people who marry out of the religion, particularly if they do it after they go through adult baptism at 18 or so. German Lutherans would have been "too worldly" to be acceptable spouses for the marriageable children in German Anabaptist family. If someone from the Anabaptist church in his family converted in order to marry, THAT might have been where the "dramatic conversion" story came from.
