Little did Lewis Fisher anticipate the stream of events that he would launch when he wrote in his will that, if his estate in Germany were ever recovered, it was to be divided among his children. Now the statement that he wrote was common enough. Many emigrants from Germany were able to recover something from the estates in Germany. In fact, it was such a common event that printers in America made forms, with blanks that could be used in filing for a claim against an estate in Germany. What Lewis did not do was to specify what the nature of the estate was. It might have been half a cow, or it might have been a fractional interest in a house there.
But the Fisher heirs did not lack imagination. At least one heir did start from Virginia for Germany in the eighteenth century, but he died en route. As time went by, the size of the estate grew until it was the entire town of Hannover. The rumor persisted. To have such a large estate, Ludwig Fischer must have been a nobleman, and so he became a Baron. All of this time there was a total lack of evidence, only speculation.
Finally, on 6 Feb 1890, more than one hundred years after the death of Lewis, one hundred and fifty heirs of Louis Fisher met in the parlors of the Louisville Hotel. The hotel proved to be too small for the crowd that came, so they adjoined to the Liederkranz Hall. They elected a chairman and organized as "The Fisher Heirs", with the express purpose of recovering the Louis Fisher estate in Germany. An executive committee was elected and their first proposal was to assess dues (five dollars). Then, Judge David R. Murray was elected to go to Germany to investigate the claim.
On his return from Germany, Judge Murray was confident that the Fisher estate was not a myth, but he had failed to find where it was located. (No one knew where Lewis had come from.) To aid in the search, he had hired a German agent. He added that the heirs must be positively identified.
On 6 Dec 1890, the executive committee was dismayed by the letter from the German agent, which stated that he had been unable to find any estate by any Fisher. Some committee members became frustrated and disillusioned. The committee took a new tack of seeing if they could find the antecedent of Louis Fisher in Virginia. This search was in vain. Meanwhile, the funds were exhausted and appeals to the membership were bringing in little money. They had spent more money than they had received.
It was the beginning of the end. No estate had been identified in Germany, nor had the ancestors of Louis Fisher been identified. The most positive result of the entire endeavor was the advance made in detailing some of the descendants of Lewis Fisher. Mattie Fisher Gashweiler assembled the collected information into a large, pictorial tree. More than 1664 names were included on the chart, which is still available, from time to time, today. Most descendants, but not all, have concluded that the whole idea was without merit.
Meanwhile, the story lives on with embellishments, as I gave it in the last note from a story on the web. There are several other points where history is in error on the family, but the attempts to correct them have been frustrating. Errors do not die easily.
(09 Feb 02)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.