John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 2164

I have some dead ends or brick walls in my ancestral tree.  For example, I do not know the villages of origin for John Carpenter (nee Zimmermann), Mark Finks, and Lewis Fisher, among the men, nor do I know the name and source of Mrs. Balthasar Blankenbuehler.  I would like to know more about Mrs. George Utz (Anna Barbara Maier).  I am not a genealogist.  I own no genealogy program for keeping track of ancestors.  Still, I have solved more brick walls and corrected more genealogical mistakes than anyone and many of these are not on my tree.  In addition, I have published a lot of research done by others.  I say all this so that you can tell where I come from.

I just received a note from a Lewis Fisher (Ludwig Fischer) descendant in which a few questions were raised.  Let me attempt to answer some of these.  Where did I obtain the information about Ludwig and his kin in Virginia?  Among the sources that are often overlooked are records at the German Lutheran Church (Hebron Church) in Culpeper County, VA.  These go a long way toward identifying the family.  The Baptismal Records are especially useful, but the Communion Lists are helpful also.  [The best source of the Baptismal and Communion Records are two books by myself and Andreas Mielke.]  These Records do not explicitly state who was the sons and daughters of Lewis Fisher, but a study of how things were done at the Church gives us the rules for implicit deductions.  Much of this, as pertains to the family of Lewis and Anna Barbara Fisher, was summarized in Beyond Germanna in volume 8, number 6 (page 471).  Several other sources, including the Garr Genealogy, are in error as Wills and the Church Records show.

In the Will of Lewis Fisher, he leaves a life interest in the home place in Culpeper County to his wife, with the place to go to son Barnett at her death.  First, Barnett's two brothers disappear from the records in Culpeper County, while Barnett and his mother remain.  Then Barnett and his mother disappear, apparently at the same time.  I believe the farm was sold by Barnett and his mother at about this time.  Barnett appears soon in Kentucky, and I would assume that his mother went with him.  Most likely a motivation for moving was to reunite the family, that is to join Barnett's two brothers, who had apparently left Culpeper County.

The will of Lewis Fisher is available.  In this he names three sons but not daughters, though they would have been included in the phrase "all my children".  This phrase was used to describe the disposition of his estate in Germany if it should be recovered.  This estate was never defined and in the imagination of his descendants it grew until it included Hanover, a castle on the Rhine, and his Barony.  The belief was persistent until an effort was made about 1900 to see if there was anything to the story.  This effort was told by James E. Brown in Beyond Germanna , volume 9, number 3, (page 501).  What is overlooked is that many Germans in America had claims on estates in Germany, though they were usually modest.  The event was so common that German printers here made forms, with blanks to be filled in, to be sent back to Germany.
(17 Aug 05)