What the Records Say —If we Can Find Them

 

One way to confirm a relative's parents' names might be to view the subsequent death records of that relative's siblings. In our search to confirm the parents of Theresa Blaising Stevens, my father-in-law's grandmother, that is what we will attempt to do today—if we can find such records.

According to Theresa's mother's 1907 obituary, six brothers remained to her after their mother's passing. Fortunately, each of those named brothers was also identified by his current place of residence. Of course, I would have further appreciated any mention of each sibling's spouse's name as well, but I'll take what I can get.

For the first child mentioned in Mary Ann Blaising's obituary, Henry, his own death certificate didn't offer much help. Though Henry lived in the same town as his mother at the point of her death, by the time of his own passing in 1931, he was living in Texas. Those left to mourn the eighty two year old immigrant, however, were hard pressed to provide information for Henry's death certificate. For his father's name, a scrawling handwriting entered what looked like an abbreviation: "Hy." Henry? And for mother's maiden name, not even a guess, though she apparently outlived her husband by years. However, the informant, Henry's daughter Rose, did know that he had been born in Lorraine, France.

Well, what about the second of Theresa's siblings? August apparently remained in New Haven long after his mother's passing there. But when we look for his own records, we spot one detail which may cause us some research problems: he was listed as J. August Blaising. Could he have been born a Jean August? No matter, we can see from that certificate, thankfully entered in a very clear handwriting, that his father's name was given as Henry Blaising. August's mother, according to his death certificate, was listed as Mary Hershbeck.

The only problem with seeing the two brothers' father listed as Henry Blaising was that Mary's own obituary gave her husband's name as Lawrence. Since the third child mentioned in Mary's obituary was also named Lawrence, I looked to his residence in Albany, New York, for any clarification, but so far have found nothing—making that task a work still in progress.

On I went through each of the sons listed in Mary's obituary. With some, I encountered problems. For son Louis, his typewritten certificate simply provided a given name for his father, something that looked like Lauren, but for the mother, "unknown." But a record of Louis' application for a marriage license made up for that lack, providing the name of his father as Lawrence Blaising. And for his mother, an interesting twist: her name was given as Mary Hershbach.

Once again I spotted variations on the sons' own names. Like his brother August, Philip was buried with a telltale leading initial "J"—Jean Phillipe?

All that leads me to wonder: if that family were indeed from France, could it be possible that not only the given names like "Louis"—spelled "Lewis" in his marriage record—were Americanized, but could the same have happened to the very surname they were all known by? What if we approached a more phonetic rendition of the possible original surname? Could it actually have been something more like Blesin? Or if truly German, as some census records had indicated, could the name have originally looked like Blaessing or Bläsing?

At some point, we'll need to take a deep breath and attempt that flying leap across the void to the continent where the family originated. We'll let the romanticized version of the family's story from Mary's obituary help guide us, but we need to be open to other possibilities as we consider the documentation.