Common Ancestor Tales

Was suprised to find a number of errors on the Wikipedia page about Jack Fisher today so I got embroiled in editing it. My suggestions were all rejected straight off – heh.

So I starting working out how to do it properly. It is quite satisfying.
I managed to update his grandfathers name from Charles-> Alfred.
And his mothers name from Sophie-> Sophia as per her baptism certificate.

I also added for amusement this rather fine document that I found last night which states that Alfred Fisher was “Purveyor of Mineral Water to the King”

However it also says that his father died when he was 15. I know from the records I purchased at Nuwara Eilya graveyard that he died in 1866.
Since Jack was born in 1841 he was 25. This was the year he was married and also the year that his sister Alice’s first three children died of Cholera (mentioned in Jan Morris’s book “Fisher’s face”).

I am attaching the record here in the hope that this may go someway in correcting that information too.

This article also quote’s the inscription
https://www.sundaytimes.lk/151018/plus/from-orphan-of-the-empire-to-admiral-of-the-fleet-167980.html

The Wikipedia article did teach me something too. I had always assumed erroneously that this photograph was of all the Fisher children. I had wondered how they could all be present since Jack left Sri Lanka aged 6. In fact the photograph was taken in England in 1865 – a year before their father died. And it is the only photograph I have of my ancestor Francis Conrad Fisher who I can now identify.

I purchased Jan Morris’s book about Fisher. It says some nice things about our Frank. She says of Jack Fisher ”On his only return visit to Ceylon, with the frigate Ocean in 1872, he was immensely taken with Frank – a perfect specimen of a man, he said, with ” a sort of bold careless proud way about him”

Unfortunately Jan’s book may have an error in it as she mistakenly states that that it was Arthur Bertram Fisher who committed suicide in middle age. I have not managed to find any records of this.

Sadly the person who she heard about may actually have been my great great grandfather who was very well liked by everyone and probably pretty much as Jacky Fisher described. His death was very unexpected and has not ever been talked about in our family. We only found out how he died when I found some newspaper articles a couple of months ago.

The fact that my great grandmother Evelyn (who I knew as a child) had had both a father and a husband that ended their lives this way was a fact that none of her grandchildren were aware of. What a stoic and admirable person she was.