A Serendipitous Find

 

It might still be August—and well over ninety degrees each day around here last week while I was away, wandering through upstate New York—but rainy weather upon my return (not to mention pumpkin spice lattes on the autumn menu already at the coffee shop) put everyone in the mood to fast-forward to the next season. Perhaps that's why I found myself doing some fall cleaning yesterday.

From a folio still containing old notes, I pulled three slips of paper which could be called a serendipitous find. Each of those three slips was dated from June of 2005, and as receipts, each showed that I had paid $3.75 for the privilege of borrowing a microfilm of records from the Family History Library. The receipts clearly identified the records I was viewing: from Saint Patrick's Catholic Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

That particular parish happened to be the home church for my father-in-law's grandfather, John Kelly Stevens, whose third wife became the only grandmother my father-in-law ever knew. Now that I have the identifier for those three microfilms I used so many years ago, I can go back and review them in digitized format, this time in search of Theresa Blaising, rather than her husband.

Having the actual microfilm number so clearly printed on the receipt became a shortcut to finding the records on the current FamilySearch.org website. Of course, I could have looked them up in the catalog by location, then drilled down to the category—church records—and hope to find the right entry. Having found these old receipts, you can be sure I'll be saving the link to the online resources for ongoing research. This time, the perspective will be the other side of the family: finding another way to trace Theresa Blaising's own heritage. Perhaps the church records will tell us something more than what's been found on civil records.

That research, however, will have to be at a local Family History Center, for the digitized microfilms are not currently available online for viewing at home. That, however, is a small price to pay for the ongoing ability to glean information on that ever-expanding family history quest.