Theresa's Six Surviving Siblings

 

One way to confirm those doubtful listings of parents' names in a death certificate might be to compare what was given in a sibling's own record. Thankfully in our case, while seeking confirmation of Theresa Blaising Stevens' parents' names, we have at least six opportunities to do so: her six siblings still remaining after their mother's 1907 passing.

According to the Fort Wayne, Indiana, obituary for Mary Blaising, she originally came to the United States from France with ten of her children. By the time of her passing, seven of those descendants remained, including Theresa herself. They were Theresa's brothers Henry, August, Lawrence, John, Philip, and Louis. Granted, those were their Americanized names, but that list provides us a starting point for launching our search for other confirmations of the Blaising children's parents' names.

Unfortunately, while this sounds like a straightforward proposition, in reality these research quests are not so easily accomplished. For one thing, if you know anything about French given names, you may realize that there may be more coming into play here than a mere Americanization of their names. The possibility of two given names for one son—such as Jean Phillipe instead of simply Philip, for instance—might make one son appear as if there were actually two, depending on how inconsistently those two names were used.

Looking back to the 1870 census, where we first found Theresa and her family in New Haven, Indiana, we can see there were seven children listed. Whether the names were not totally identical to those in Mary's obituary may be a case of editorial error on the part of the newspaper where Mary's obituary had been published—or perhaps a case of census enumerator error in the 1870 census. Whatever the case might be, that 1870 census provides a sister for Theresa rather than all brothers. And there was no sign of a son named Lawrence, despite that child most likely being a namesake for his father, who was by then presumed dead back in France, or at least not likely to have fathered another son after 1870.

No matter; now that we have at least a partially confirmed list of Theresa's siblings, our next task will be to trace the location of each sibling to find records of each sibling's family across the decades, and particularly to locate their own death certificates. Let's see whether the names of Mary Blaising's parents still turn out to be Henry "Herochbeck" and Mary Ann Becker.