There is the possibility that Helen Gregoroffsky Fisher did eventually come to visit at Ury House. She came to Philadelphia...
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Ury House -- 1813
Sunday 19 [September 1813]...At dinner I set by the side of Mrs. F. the widow of young Mr. F. late son of M F of Philada.* Her misfortunes are early and singular. She is by birth a Russian, and a native of Moscow. Her Parents died when she was very young leaving an orphan destitute of property. Mrs. Krehmer became her patroness and she was brought up in her family. She is well educated and sensible, and speaks the Russian, German, French and English languages fluently. She is apparently twenty three or four. She was addressed by Young F. to whom she gave her hand. They were married in the spring of the present year. He was two or three years older than his bride. On the day after they espousals she removed to his house. On the morning following poor F. on descending a stone stair case from the chamber of his wife, he fell, and before he was discovered had breathed his last. His fall had not been heard and he had remained a corpse an hour before he was found, casually by one of the servants. What a scene of agony and horror of r the widow Bride. How short the dream of fancied happiness. But one day had she worn the nuptial garment when she was doomed to cover herself with the sable weeds of the widow. She expressed a strong inclination to visit the friends of her late husband in America. I told her they were Quakers and that their manners and mode of life would not please her. She replied, that she was sure, that they were amiable and that was enough.
*Miers Fisher, son of Miers Fisher of Philadelphia, a member of the assembly, first councellor for the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, and a director of the Bank of North America and the Insurance Company of Pennsylvania, and Sarah Redwood of Newport. The father was a Quaker, as indeed were the family in general, and was among those deported to Winchester, Va. by Congress in 1777 (Gilpin, "Exiles in Virginia", passim). The son, Miers Fisher (1786-1813), in his twenty-first year [1807] sailed to Cadiz, and on the return voyage to Havana he was seized with yellow fever. In April, 1809, he sailed as supercargo to Russia. The vessel was captured by a Danish privateer, and reached Cronstadt just before the closing of the Neva River. He remained in St. Petersburg, where he established a mercantile house. He married, June, 4, 1813, Helen Gregoroffsky, niece of Gen. Alexander Focke, who had been educated in England. "Their marriage was allowed to take place by the gracious condescension of the Emperor Alexander without his being subject to the various regulations of the Greek Church. You cannot concieve the sensation in this town among all ranks. He was taken off 30 hours after his marriage by a fit of apoplexy" [from a letter of John Venning to Bainbridge and Brown of London]. His widow died in Cincinnati, Ohio, April 9, 1828. I am indebted to Mr. John W. Jordan for the information
Elizabeth Donnan, editor, Papers of James A. Bayard, 1796-1815 (Washington D.C.: American Historical Association, 1913). p. 461.
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