Fisher Family Genealogy Update Part 1

I haven’t changed the family tree, but will eventually.

So after having a near meltdown in trying to find more information about the person I call John Fisher, the Elder and his wife Mary Anna Groff, I have been able to secure enough data points to confirm most of what we knew or were told eventually. But I have to add a lot of new info, including new persons, in the story.

Let’s start with Rude Fisher, my great-grandfather and the father of Della Mae Fisher Dixon. John Rudolph “Rude” Fisher’s father was John Fredrick Fisher and John Fredrick Fisher’s father was John Fisher from Hesse-Darmstadt in Germany. All sometimes spelled the name Fischer.

Here’s the evolving story:

The genealogical summary I got from my cousin Curt Thacker in February 2008 listed John Fisher as the husband of Elizabeth Walters and the father of 4 boys: John Rudolph, William, Herman and Charles. We had DOB and DOD only for Rude. We also had listed Rude’s marriage to Marinda Myra Bell and their 4 daughters, Della May(sic), Mabel Avis, Vera Sylvia and Emily Marie. We had DOB for Marinda (and we really knew DOB on all these girls.

The Fisher Clan post that same month showed a 1910 photo of a father and 4 sons (Rude, William, Herman, Charles) and their wives and children.

The post titled “Children of John Fredrick Fisher”, done at the end of July 2008, was based on a typed and handwritten document shared with me by my grandmother’s nieces when I visited Albion in July of 2008. It identifies the father of Rude and his brothers as John Fredrick Fisher (often John F. Fisher) and gives his DOB as December 25, 1846 and DOD as September 7, 1931. It confirms his wife’s name as Elizabeth Walters and lists Rude and his brothers and gives a date of birth and death for each. It also lists another brother, Ralph, who died at age 4. It also lists the wives and children of each.

They also said that Rude had a half-sister, Katie, but did not list a mother’s name for her. So we knew that John F. remarried. They said Katie married Clarence Green and they had 6 kids.

They also recorded something we knew forever, which was that Rude Fisher married Maude Bell, the sister of his first wife Marinda. They had a daughter, Ina. So my grandmother’s aunt was also her stepmom and she had a half sister.

Skip to December of 2019 and I rely upon 4 sources of information.

The FindAGrave web site shows the second wife to be Alzada Castleberry and Katie is the daughter of John Fredrick and Alzada. And there is another child named Lyman, who dies in childhood.

A book of Illinois History by Risley et al from 1910 wherein Mr. Risley has a chapter on the history of Wabash County, Illinois, which is east of Edwards County and on the Illinois side of the Wabash River, the border with Indiana. That book has profiles of two Fisher men and the husband of a Fisher girl, who are the children of John Fisher and Anna Marie Groff. In the write up, I find a John Rudolph Fisher. But not our Rude Fisher as I found this person’s gravestone photo in Wabash County. Rude is buried in Bethel Cemetery in Ellery just outside Albion in Edwards County. I also see that the father of those profiled has a son named John F who lives at the time the book is written in Dexter, Missouri. It doesn’t seem likely that John Fredrick Fisher would be in Missouri.

This obviously calls into question the idea that John and Mary Anna (or Anna Marie) Groff are the parents of John Fredrick Fisher and thus the great grandparents of Della Mae Fisher Dixon. Then I find a marriage recorded in Edwards County on the Genealogy Trails web site for John Fredrick Fisher and Letitia Selner. Were there two John F. Fishers in the area near Albion? That’s not likely. And then on Ancestry.com I found the golden nugget, in the 1900 census for Edwards County. It lists John F. Fisher and wife Letitia....and wait for it...son John Rudolph Fisher and several other kids! Some of those kids have the names of the famous Fisher’s profiled in Wabash County. German names. And the 1910 census actually says that they lived in Missouri during 1910 even though they are counted in the Edwards County census for that year.

And sure enough, I think to go back to a picture I had posted the same month of a Fisher family reunion in 1928. Did I remember seeing somebody named Letitia or Lettie? Sure enough, she’s standing plain as day on the far right side of the picture holding a grandbaby. She and Rude’s father had been married 32 years by that time. They finished raising Rude, and Katie and several other kids that I still need to report on. And John Fredrick uses the same strategy of naming kids after family, in several cases naming them after his brothers who stay in Wabash County. Our John Rudolph is actually the nephew of the John Rudolph who lives and dies in Wabash County.

So John Fredrick Fisher was the son of John and Anna Marie or Mary Anna Groff, who did come from Germany and John Fredrick had 3 wives and we all lived happily every after.

So why didn’t Dad’s cousins mention the person that their Grandpa John Fredrick Fisher married in 1896 and lived with for over 30 years? And I’ll eventually record all of the siblings and half siblings of Rude Fisher and repost the family chart.