It's a StAve Factory

 

If you look hard enough, you can find the answer to almost any question online. In my struggle to determine just why a French widow with ten children would leave her home on a journey not just to America, but to one specific tiny town in Indiana, I stumbled upon quite a bit of information. Being the rabbit-trail-prone creature that I am, this time my tendencies to become sidetracked stood me in good stead. Specifically, they led me to more than just one answer in my search to discover where the "stove" factory might have been located which employed two Blaising sons. I'm glad I kept looking. Not only was the place not a "stove" factory, but the resources I found along the way led me to the most likely reason why Mary Blaising chose to settle in New Haven, Indiana.

To start with, it was likely a stave factory, not a stove factory, where Henry and John Blaising worked in 1870.

I am apparently not the only one to have been misled by some hurried handwriting in census records. In my search for further information, I first found a written history of another family—the James Minerd family—which had moved to nearby Monroeville and, as the author noted from the 1880 census, the father and two of his sons worked in a "stove" factory.

Aha! Now I had another keyword to add to my search, and I was off, scouring the web for references to a "stove" factory in Monroeville. That misapplied search is where—thankfully—I stumbled upon a listing of French immigrant settlements in Allen County, Indiana, precisely the county where Mary Blaising and her children settled when they headed to New Haven.

Searching for that "stove" factory in Monroeville was the meandering route that led me to discover material recounting the history of Besancon, a French settlement and Catholic parish from 1846, long predating the Blaising family's arrival in Indiana. If I had known to look earlier—rather than prompted by a wild chase to find "stove" factories in the county—I might have spotted the brief mention of the place in the general Wikipedia entry on the topic of New Haven.

And there, in the pages I found, recounting the history of the Besancon settlement, I spotted the mention (on page four) of Monroeville and their factories for "the manufacture of barrel staves."

Regardless of whether Henry and John Blaising worked at a factory in Monroeville, I now have stumbled upon some helpful details of a French settlement which can guide me in answering the question of why immigrant Mary Blaising might have chosen to settle her family in, of all places, Indiana.