Rewind: Theresa, From Finish to Start

 

You know genealogists: when we want to know the story of a relative's life, we start at the end and work our way back to the beginning. It's no different when we look at the life of Theresa Blaising Stevens, step-mother to Will Stevens and grandmother to Will's children, including my father-in-law.

The document left to us at the finish line of Theresa's life tells it all—sort of. The main problem with death records is that we must rely on the accuracy of cool-headed memory to record key bits of information—information like where the deceased was born or what her mother's maiden name might have been. And those are precisely the kinds of details most likely to slip a distraught relative's mind at the moment of a family member's passing.

In the case of Theresa, who died at eighty one years of age, her husband—John Kelly Stevens—had long been gone, predeceasing her by eighteen years. He certainly wasn't around to report what he knew of the twenty-one year old bride he had married in 1887, back in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That task, if it fell to any family members, would have been the job of Theresa's step-son, Will—except that he, too, had died before her.

Best I can piece together of Theresa's last days was that though she still lived in Fort Wayne, she was likely visiting her step-son's family in Chicago when she died, as the address given on her death record is on a street where the Stevens family once lived. The informant's name, though, is not one of a family member. Possibly that informant's name given on the record was for a caretaker or medical assistant.

Still, the details can provide us some guidance. We just need to keep pressing onward until we find better information, which we'll do bit by bit this week. So far, what we can see from Theresa's record is that the informant did not know Theresa's father's name, other than giving the surname as "Blasing." However, her mother's name was provided as Mary Hirshberg, and Theresa's own place of birth was given as "Alsace Lorraine, Allen, France."

Lest you wonder whether the "Allen" in that given birthplace might have signaled confusion with Theresa's resident county in Indiana, let's save these determinations for such time as we find secondary verifications. This, at least, was a start—and we need to remember that, no matter how old a relative might have been, or how expected her time of death, her passing still would have brought on stressors to the rest of the family, pressures that may have caused people to blurt out misinformation unintentionally.

After her passing, the family's plan was to return her remains to Fort Wayne, where she would be buried in the mausoleum at the Catholic Cemetery, right next to her husband, John Kelly Stevens. There, the simple etching of her dates tells us that Theresa was born in 1866, though far from the "Fort Wayne" entry given at Find A Grave. Rather than rely on that well-meaning volunteer's entry, we'll need to rewind Theresa's story even further, and look to see what we can find on either her as-yet-unnamed paternal side, or through the maternal side of a woman whose name we now have as Mary Hirshberg.