What We Know About Theresa

 

My father-in-law's only non-Irish relative was the only grandmother he ever really knew. Her name was Theresa Blaising. Though she was an immigrant, she definitely didn't come to Fort Wayne, Indiana, from Ireland.

Theresa entered the Stevens family as step-mother to my father-in-law's father, Will Stevens. She was actually the third wife of Will's father, John Kelly Stevens. John had lost the previous two wives to complications of childbirth, a much more prevalent condition during the time period when Will was born in 1884.

Theresa had no children of her own. Whether that was a wise move of self-preservation on her part or an unfortunate situation of childlessness, I can't tell. But she did raise Will, the only son of John Kelly Stevens' second wife, Catherine Kelly, and his older sister Kathryn, daughter of John Kelly's first wife Mary Clara Miller.

While Theresa's relationship with her step-daughter seemed rocky at best—Kathryn seemed all but estranged from the family as an adult—the many letters kept by Will, and ultimately handed down through the family after his passing, show an ongoing connection with Theresa up until her own death in the summer of 1947.

Tracing Theresa's roots has its ups and downs. She apparently arrived in the United States as a young child—four years of age or possibly younger—but where she actually came from is given to political interpretation. For instance, when I found her family in the 1870 census in New Haven, Indiana, they were listed as originating in France. By the time of the 1900 census, long after her 1887 marriage to John Kelly Stevens, her national identity was listed as Germany.

Making a practice of checking an ancestor's entry in each decennial census record pays off, for in the 1880 census, an enumerator fortunately made one of those greatly-appreciated mistakes and instead of recording the current geo-political designation, had entered the name of the actual region where the family originated: Lorraine. Checking a brief history of the Lorraine region reveals the explanation for the vacillating answers; it was not a moment too soon that the 1870 census had shed light on the Blaising family's ethnic origin, for the very next year saw the takeover of that embattled region by the Germans.

Checking each decade's census entry for Theresa and her family has a corollary benefit: I now have names to help build her family constellation. This, too, becomes a way to more securely trace the right family line, a project we'll begin working on with the beginning of the upcoming week.