Rachel Braucher was originally from Virginia, where she was born in 1832. She moved to Illinois with her family in 1846 by covered wagon and first settled in Monticello. She married Col. Isaac Braucher (1800 - 1870) in 1854. She was his fourth wife. He had fathered eleven children with his first three wives, five of the children from those marriages were still living and probably living with their father when Isaac and Rachel married. Isaac had a saw mill and farm in Logan County.
Rachel's obituary notes that she was a very active member of the Spiritualist Church in Bloomington since moving there in 1893. (She lived with her daughter Mrs. Elmer Folsom at 1208 N Clinton) Her service was performed by a prominent spiritualist minister Rev. E W Sprague of Detroit Michigan at her home. He had been a life long friend of the family.
One letter of Rachel's from 1865 has been preserved on Ancestry.com and relates the death of her five year old son Sammy. Sammy was taken by tonsillitis when his breathing was affected by the swelling. She wrote to her friend that Sammy bade all his cousins farewell and gave her a kiss before he died. "I feel as if I could weep my life away." She also related the deaths of several other family members in the area, including the death of one of Isaac's grandsons on the same date of the same complaint as Sammy.
The Spiritualist Church in Bloomington had several homes and was quite active in the city. The first building dedicated to their use (1894) was a brick schoolhouse on West Street, behind the German ME Church. Sometimes the Spiritualist were called upon to defend their faith, and Mr. M W Packard was one of those defenders, writing in 1900 that we are all spirits living in an incarnate form and that while conventional Christianity is unable to prove that the spirit life continues beyond the end of bodily existence, the spiritualists were able to prove life beyond this world. In 1915 an Illlinois law was passed that made the operations of clairvoyants, fortune tellers and mediums illegal. The Spiritualists lobbied in Springfield to have the law amended to not include mediums, who were essential to the operations of the Spiritualist Church.
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