Sure, Make a List — But Check it Twice

 

If we draw up a list of the facts we've gleaned from Theresa Blaising Stevens' death record, we'll have the following:

• Father: Blasing, unknown first name
• Mother: Mary Hirshberg
• Birth: Lorraine

If, however, at that point we simply dust off our hands with a resounding and victorious "There!" we may simply open ourselves up to being misled down the path of genealogical discovery. We've made our list, alright, and we are ready to move on, but before we do, we need to check that list twice.

I'm a huge fan of seeking more than one document to confirm each detail about an ancestor's life. In the case of Theresa, our quest to find her roots will be expedited if we look for additional records. And that is exactly what I did: check for Theresa in multiple documents. Not only did I check a census record from her early years of marriage—the 1900 census gave her place of origin as Germany, and her arrival in the United States at about one year of age—but also located possible records from her childhood home in Indiana.

There, in the earliest census record in which I can find the "Blasing" family—the 1870 census enumeration for New Haven in Allen County, Indiana—Theresa was listed as an immigrant from France. Her age was given as two years. And her mother's name, encouragingly enough, was Mary, just as Theresa's own death record, decades later, indicated.

All well and good, until we seek further information. Eventually, a 1907 obituary for a "well known pioneer woman" who died in New Haven confirmed that Theresa's mother was indeed born in France—in Lorraine, as it turns out. That discovery pointed me to a death certificate for "Mary Anna" Blaising, which in turn gives us the chance to view the possible names of Mary's parents.

Spoiler alert: if you were thinking this death certificate would confirm the details on Mary's maiden name that we saw in Theresa's own death record, go back to re-read yesterday's post. Or here, I'll save you the time: names provided for death certificates by informants are often given under the stress of grief over loss and can sometimes include mistaken details.

So, Mary's maiden name, as given by the informant for her own death certificate? According to her son August, at whose New Haven home Mary had died, Mary's maiden name might have been something like Herschbeck. But I can't tell for sure; the handwriting, while clear, actually looked like it said "Herochbeck." Either way, it certainly wasn't Hirshberg, as had been given by the subsequent generation when Theresa herself had passed in 1947.

Added bonus: that lingering doubt about troubled memories calls the provision of Mary's mother's name into question, as well. Perhaps it was Mary Ann Becker, as her son August reported it. Or not. There's only one thing left for us to do: check that list of gleaned facts not just twice, but maybe three times. Or more.     

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.

Do You Know Something I Don't Know?

 

The last few weeks have been rather rough. After promptly getting sick at home following a conference in Houston—where, in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, we had a downpour every day—I hardly had enough energy to drive myself into town to run errands. No matter; before my trip, I had unexpectedly spotted a black widow slithering under the driver seat of my car, and I was in no rush to commandeer the buggy thing until long after I had bug-bombed it. In the meantime, my daughter kindly chauffeured me to meetings and appointments while I recuperated.

Around here, with the arrival of August, school is back in session, and that isn't just the case for the kids. Our city's active seniors' lifelong learning organizations are hosting their own back-to-class sessions, and as their genealogy instructor, I was scheduled to attend one organization's social event at a local college on Friday. True, I had just spent a week enjoying rides in air conditioned comfort in my daughter's vehicle (while awaiting the demise of said black widow), but I was a bit taken back by my daughter's constant questioning, "Are you sure you don't want me to drive you to the meeting?" What I should have asked her was, "Do you know something I don't know?"

For some reason, my husband was also keenly aware of my meeting at the college. He walked into the lecture hall where our social gathering was being held just minutes after I received a surprise award for being volunteer of the year. I may catch on to things slowly, but at that point, it dawned on me I wasn't far off track in wondering why everyone was so particular about my meeting plans for the day.

Now that I'm pulling up records for my biweekly count, it occurred to me that that question—"Do you know something I don't know?"—is a useful question for all of us while we puzzle over our family tree. As I continue exchanging research discoveries with a newly-found Flannery researcher, I send her a copy of a family keepsake and realize I may be the only one in possession of such documentation. I knew something she didn't know, but now that I've shared it, she knows, too.

Sometime in the past two weeks while adding 131 more names to my in-laws' 36,284-person family tree, I uploaded an obituary from Newspapers.com which happened to mention the possible name of someone else's birth mother. That someone spotted that posted obituary and reached out to ask if I had any more information. Unfortunately, the connection stretched beyond the third cousin level and thus was no one I knew personally—you know me: bushy trees for DNA testing—but if I had, it would have been an answer I could have shared which that adoptee didn't otherwise know.

Someone out there does know, of course, no matter what the question might be. In the aggregate, the information assembled on multiple genealogy sites provides a multitude of searching people with answers, but in the end, there are still several questions left unanswered. However, in boxes passed down to us from grandparents or maiden aunts or bachelor uncles, or tucked in attics or even written on the backs of furniture or—yes! incredibly!—plastered within the walls of our homes may be the answers we thought we'd never find.

Or, to put it more specifically, someone else might be unearthing the answer to our questions...except that they don't yet realize that they know something we don't know. The challenge is how to connect the answers with the seekers.  

About all Those Other Trees

 

In genealogy, we start climbing our family tree from a singular position: we start with ourself. Adding two parents, then four grandparents, then eight greats, well, we eventually realize that family tree is going to overwhelm us. Sure, we mitigate that "overwhelm" state by ditching those old-fashioned paper pedigree charts for a digital version, whether online or on our own desktop device, but we are ever expanding upward and outward.

Before that moment when we truly spiral out of control, perhaps that scenario means posting the family tree in more than one location. After all, when I talked all those relatives into taking DNA tests, I had to post a family tree where that relative's test was taken—so now I have trees at Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, 23andMe, and the soon-to-be-migrated Family Tree DNA. And oh, don't forget the biggest, free-est granddaddy of them all: FamilySearch.org. Of course I couldn't attend RootsTech without participating in  "Relatives at RootsTech"—so now I have a tree on that website, as well.

Why stop there? When I wanted to message someone who posted a tree on Geni.com matching my orphan photograph album subjects in Ireland, I gained permission granted to talk to other subscribers by posting a tree of my own there. Likewise, falling in love with the careful documentation shared by some Carter researchers on WikiTree, I began building a tree there.

Sigh. And to think I hardly can keep up with my one main online tree, let alone the tree I built for my in-laws. It's time to revamp my research schedule to work in time to revisit all these trees scattered throughout the digisphere. Like so much digital litter flung far throughout the ether, these unfinished fragments of family trees need more attention.

One thought is to set up a routine governed by and partnered with my Twelve Most Wanted: select an ancestor to research each month, but within that same month, make sure that that ancestor's entries are updated at each of the various tree sites where I'm now participating. After all, when I joined WikiTree, I could hardly upload my thirty-thousand-plus family tree digitally to that site—at the time, they limited such uploads to less than five thousand names—so there is already lots of work to finish there. Re-pacing myself and taking this task one baby step at a time might better ensure that the job actually gets done.

Perhaps you are not one to scatter yourself too thin among the myriad online tree-building websites like I am. Or perhaps you do have your family tree posted at several sites in that never-ending quest to find more cousins. In true genealogical guinea pig mode, I am examining my options in real time right now, and am curious how others handle this ever-expanding opportunity to reach out and post family trees. Bottom line for right now: finding a manageable way to keep all those trees satisfactorily updated in a systematic manner. And that may just be the key to opening up the answer: doing what needs to be done systematically. 

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.

"The Only Grandmother I Ever Knew"

Sometimes, our work in digging up family history can unearth some details which upset our relatives' understanding of their relatives. As much as I appreciated my long-deceased father-in-law's brother Edward, who as "Uncle Ed" guided me through the generations of the Stevens family, once I began researching in earnest, I uncovered some conflicting details. 

My first step in such cases, of course, was to consult him. After all, he was my guide through all the names and dates, thanks to all the records, letters, and other memorabilia that family had stored for decades. But when I asked him about his grandfather John Kelly Stevens' wife—on paper, Ed's grandmother was named Catherine Kelly, another confusing detail—he mentioned the name of another woman: Theresa Blaising. "She's the only grandmother I ever knew," he reminisced.

That indeed was true, for Uncle Ed's maternal grandfather was long gone by the time he was born, and his maternal grandmother died when he was still an infant. Even his paternal grandfather John Kelly Stevens died when Ed was a young boy, so the only grandparent left to him was Theresa.

As it turned out, Theresa, living in Fort Wayne, Indiana, wrote many letters to her step-son and his family over the years. In the family's true packrat tradition, several letters—if not all—were saved in a special keepsake drawer at the Stevens home in Chicago until years later when Ed's widow gifted them to my husband.

Knowing the techniques of family research, it wasn't hard for me to find Theresa documented in several of the usual resources genealogists frequent, so I've already found much on this woman. I selected Theresa as one of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year because, despite not being a "blood" relative, she played an important part in the lives of my father-in-law's family, and I'd like to learn more about her own roots. This month will launch us into that journey of discovery, beginning with a review tomorrow of what is already known about her, thanks to family memories. 

It's (Not) a Wrap

 

In genealogy, it's never "a wrap." There is always more work to be done, another generation to find, elusive documents to track down. That, at least, seems to be the story for my father-in-law's Irish side of the family. We've spent a month—again!—chipping away at his great-grandmother Margaret Flannery's side of the family, but with little more to tell than we had gathered after the last attempt. And now, that month is over.

I've got a bit of reading to do before tackling this family line once again, now that I've purchased Irish Migrants in the Canadas. Once again, I'll comb through the listed family trees of my husband's DNA matches at five different companies in hopes more distant Flannery cousins have tested. But my real hope will be to stumble upon yet another Flannery descendant who inherited that packrat, er, keepsake tendency to never discard any slip of paper in the family's records, no matter how insignificant. After all, if it weren't for descendants of two of Margaret Flannery's children holding on to a written confirmation of their baptismal record from the parish of Ballina and Boher back in County Tipperary, I wouldn't even have known her maiden name.

From this point onward, we'll move to another challenge in my father-in-law's family history, but this time it won't be an Irish immigrant. Last winter, when I planned out my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors to research for this year, I could already tell that I might be facing three brick wall struggles in a row with his side of the family.

So, for my third research challenge, I decided to switch to another member of the Stevens family—but one blended in to the family by marriage to a widower. Tomorrow, we'll start a new month with an introduction to the only Stevens grandmother my father-in-law and his siblings ever knew.