Harriet's Legacy

The first step, when examining a potential First Families candidate, is to determine whether he or she was resident in the geographic location in question. In the case of the widowed Harriet Beeman Blain—and, eventually, divorcee of English immigrant Benjamin Johnson—she technically satisfied that requirement for our local county genealogical society's program by the tiniest of margins. Sure, she arrived in San Joaquin County at least four years before the program's century cutoff date—1924 at this point—but she hardly lived more than a couple years here before dying in May of 1921.

The next question might be about the children she left behind—for she did have four daughters who survived her, despite no mention of their names in her funeral notice. Did they remain in the same county?

I had thought that each of Harriet's daughters had moved on from this county, a possible reason why there was no mention of those survivors. Harriet's legacy, as far as a First Families program went, would be very brief, judging from later notices of all four daughters dying far from the home to which their mother had brought them in their move from Kansas to California after their father's unfortunate death.

As it turned out, in following the trail of Harriet's descendants, with her oldest daughter Emma we find clarification demonstrating a family of descendants reaching into a subsequent generation in this county.

Emma's own story followed a winding path. Married barely a month prior to her mother's passing in the same home where she spent her teenage years—that same 1436 S. San Joaquin Street that the Stockton city directory once labeled as her step-father Benjamin Johnson's home—Emma became the wife of Greek immigrant Peter Chrisos. Her husband's tragic death in 1928 from tuberculosis not long after the birth of their son left Emma rebuilding her life with a first step of regaining her United States citizenship. An odd insertion in a newspaper report of that naturalization ceremony noted her as "Mrs. Emma Lelia Chrisos, Greece, born Kansas."

Emma later married immigrant Joseph P. McCartan from Ireland, but by then laws had changed and she no longer needed to regain her citizenship in order to vote. By the time of the 1950 census, Emma was still living in Stockton, not far from the home downtown where she had spent her teenage years.

Though her 1954 death record showed her place of death as San Francisco—the detail which had led me to believe she had moved out of our county—it was through her obituary that I learned the reason for her place of death being outside our county. Due to an illness occurring while at work for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, she had been hospitalized locally for a week, then transferred to a hospital in San Francisco for further treatment. In the end, Emma Blain Chrisos McCartan's final resting place was back in San Joaquin County, where she had spent the majority of her life.

That same obituary also confirmed the details I had found on Emma's sisters: that they had moved out of San Joaquin County for other locations—the very report which had originally prompted me to think the entire family had remained here for only a few years. Two sisters had moved to the Bay Area and one north to Sacramento, thus making my original assumption seem logical that Emma, too, had moved to San Francisco. Doubling up on details and documents, however, helps us see the clearer picture.

While it would make sense, based on current program requirements, to say that our bereft and wandering widow Harriet Blain would technically qualify for recognition in our county's First Families program by virtue of the two or three years that she lived in Stockton, it seemed such a sliver of history for such a notation. The First Families image of an immigrant founder was certainly not part of Harriet's story—and yet, there she was, at the right place and the right time to be included in our county's story. Still, to see that at least one of her daughters remained here for another generation seems to help fit the spirit of such First Families programs.