The First John Fischer in Our American Family?

Terry Harper told me that the Fisher family came over from Germany and sent me this photo of the first immigrant in the Fisher... or should we say... Fischer family. I’m not sure when the name became Americanized by dropping the ‘c’. This guy appears to spell it with Fischer. The Albion Journal, reprinting tax lists, used Fischer once and Fisher twice in the late 1800’s.

The picture was taken in Mt. Carmel, a town east of Albion that is actually just on the Illinois side of the Wabash River. The date on the back of the picture would be consistent with the earliest years of portrait photography in rural Illinois. We know that Mathew Brady was doing portraits and battlefield scenes during the civil war, but he was a pioneer. To do affordable portraits in the “rural west” would have come later.

Comparing the dates of this picture with the 1928 Fisher family photo, this gentleman is most likely the father of John Fredrick Fisher. My grandma Della’s dad is Rude, her grandfather is John Fredrick and this guy, who remains nameless just for the moment, is likely her great grandfather.

There is also nothing unusual about Germans immigrating to the area at this time. Although Albion was known as “The English Settlement”, we have a number of Germans moving to West Salem in Edwards County. The founders of Mt. Carmel is the Hinde family. Sounds German. Note: I found out later that Hinde was a religious leader and was of the German Methodist faith. I didn’t know there was a “German Methodist” church, but there was and it folded into the combined Methodist church of our youth. There were large numbers of German immigrants in the 1800’s. They don’t always learn English right away, but some do. Animosity toward Germans doesn’t happen until late in World War I when America joins the war.

They are white and Protestant. Anti-Catholic sentiment is a far greater issue in Illinois and the country altogether, perhaps excluding Maryland. Anti-immigrant attitudes really begin with the large number of Irish, Chinese and the catholic countries of Southern Europe and Eastern Europe.