On December 20, 1772, Benjamin Risher married in North Carolina, to Mary de la Fontaine who was born on December 24, 1753, also in the New Bern area. Mary was the daughter of Francis de la Fontaine, Jr. and Jemima Jasper; Francis de la Fontaine Jr., was the son of Francis de la Fontaine and Mary Glannison, and a descendent of Jean de la Fontaine.

In the sixteenth century, the De la Fontaines, prominent members of the French Christian community, renounced Catholicism and joined the "reformed church"; becoming Protestant was to have dire consequences for the family. An account of the suffering of the Fontaine Family through several generations is in the autobiotraphy of Reverend James de la Fontaine; Memoirs of a Huguenot Family. Reverend Fontain was the great-grandfather of Mary Fontaine Risher.

The Protestant Reformation was a political and social upheaval as well as a religious one, splitting the Christian community forever, but also changing the relationship of all Christians to the stat. It was a revolt led by the ruling class.

"The sternest measures of suppression were directed against the Anabaptists and Calvinists who threatened the social and political order. His (Holy Roman Emperor) attitude toward the Reformation was primarily motivated by the specter of rebellion by the Protestant German princes against the emperor, less by religious consideration. The Protestants were forced to reconvert or emigrate; forced conversions, wholesale confiscation of property of the heretics, and cruel sentences were given to Protestant ministers." (Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1528-1918, University of California Press, 1974.)

The changes in the religious sphere were the most important reason why our families were in the British American colonies before the American Revolution. No longer tolerated in the Catholic dominated countries on the European Continent, the Protestants were encouraged to settle in America where land was granted only "....to Protestants of good character."


The Protestant Reformation began on October 31, 1517, still celebrated as Reformation Day, the day Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenburg, Germany. "Luther's challenge to some of the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church gave birth to th Reformation," a movement that was to split the Christian community forever, and to cause bloody civil wars between Catholics and Protestants, whereever in Europe Protestant groups organized.

"In 1536, at the General Council in Geneva, citizens unanimously agreed that they would live according to the Holy Law of the Gospel. The Reformation had been established." Led by Luther and Calvin, "The era wok Christian society out of decades of malaise and uncertainty."

However, there was no uncentainty in the reaction of the Catholic Church to the "reformed religion." Accused of heresy and tried by the Catholic authorities, the Protestants were forced to renounce their faith and return to Catholicism, emigrate or be killed. In France, there were several bloody civil wars betweem tje twp Cjrostoam(?) groups from 1562 to 1580 that included the massacre of 50,000 Huguenots, French Protestants, on St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1572. (The name Huguenot was first applied to French Protestants who met at night (Nuit) to "...worship at king Hugo's Gate," in the city of Tours, France-Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, October, 1985).

There were many massacres of Protestants in France and in Italy. Several thousand Huguenots fled to Protestant Controlled areas in France, but many more, about 400,00, fled to Switzerland, Germany and Holland. Protestant Holland was the safest refuge on the European Continent. The Jennings family, Italian Protestants, escaped, went down the Rhine River to Holland, later to England, and were in South Carolina in 1736.

Designed to end the fighting between the French Protestants and Catholics, the Edict of Nantes was issued in 1598 granting a modicum of vivil and religious liberty to the Huguenots. Religious persecution was to stop, and the Protestants were granted the right to build churches and denominational schools.

However, the persecution of the Huguenots was little abated after 1598. Most of the Protestant strongholds were lost, almost all of their churches were destroyed, and most importantly, all of the provisions of the Ekict of Nantes had been repealed by royal edicts and ordinances long before the official revocation of the Edict, on October 22, 1685, by Louis XIV.

After 1685, there was unrestricted persecution of the Huguenots; they were forced to renounce their riligion or die. Emigration was not allowed because so many had left France under the earlier policy, and escape from France was necessary. Reverend James de la Fontaine, after a perilous journye across the English Channel, arrived in England in December 1685. His autobiographi, Mimoirs of a Huguenot Family, is the source of information on the Fontaine family beginning with his great grandfather, John de la Fontaine; earlier generations are better presented in Winston Fontaine's The History of a Fontaine Family and Kinfolks.