From the very first, my idea of getting into “genealogy” was
that it would become a place where I could capture and store all the old
stories my mother told me as I was growing up.
She died unexpectedly in 1982, and at that time the subject of genealogy
wasn’t even on my radar screen. But two
years later I was introduced to it by a friend I hadn’t seen in a long
time. It was her enthusiasm and
encouragement that started me thinking I could make some order out of the “old
stories” my mother told me about the farm in Kansas, the tornados they lived
through, the fire that burned down their house, the photography school she
attended in Illinois, her grandfather who left his grandchildren a nice chunk
of money when he died that came to them in the middle of the Great Depression,
her authoress grandmother….and ultimately the trip that brought her to
California.
I started into genealogy with what is called a family group
sheet – a form on which to capture the “name, rank and serial number” (so to
speak) of each family that I was related to.
I learned how to hunt down elusive facts; sometimes it was as easy as
picking up the phone and making a phone call to an aunt. Other times I had to send off to county
offices to get a copy of a birth or death certificate. This was all before the advent of both the
personal computer and the internet, so overall it was not a particularly
effortless chore. Those empty blanks on
the family group sheet were always calling to me for answers.
It is now thirty years later, and they are still calling. Today I’m hunting for the details of the
short life of Blanche Stevens. She truly
is an Immortal Nobody, and while I suspect
I’ll never have a picture of her to post on Find-a-Grave or on the blog,
hopefully I can get a sense of this child who actually was my grandma’s cousin.
Here’s what I know about Blanche.
She was
born in 1889 in Wichita, Kansas. Her dad
was George Stevens and her mom was Sarah Smith Stevens. She had a brother, George Dewey Stevens, born
in 1898. Her mom died in 1900 of Bright’s
Disease. Needing a mother for his
children, her dad married Adelia Gale on Christmas Day of 1901. Daddy George took a job in Guthrie, Oklahoma
and the family moved there.
In December
of 1909, Blanche married E. E. Thompson at the age of 20. In November of 1910, Blanche died. She is buried in the Summit View Cemetery in
Guthrie. Her husband ultimately
remarried and moved to Florida. Her
brother graduated from college and became a geologist and moved to Texas. Father George and stepmother Adelia followed
George Jr. and ultimately died and are buried in Houston.
That’s what I know about Blanche. That’s not enough.
Genealogy reflects our culture, and it is not surprising
that there is a paucity of information about most of the females that we are
researching, especially the ones who die soon after reaching adulthood. In the case of many women of that day, often
there is a grave of a baby beside the mother, or named on the same tombstone. Many, many women died in childbirth. Is that what happened to Blanche? 1910 is fairly early to expect a death
certificate to be required. Logan
County, where Guthrie is, says I must send in a $15 research fee to see if a
death certificate for Blanche exists. I
am paying for research time; if one exists I’ll receive a copy of it. If one doesn’t, the fee still applies. I have no problem with that. If it does, I will be able to add a little
knowledge to the life of Blanche.
What else might be available that would shed light on her
life? It is a little early for high
school yearbooks. Does the public
library have copies of them that far back? Or perhaps the high school does. If so, can someone see if a picture of her
exists in that yearbook? I hope, I hope….but
I’m not holding my breath.
Do old copies (or microfilmed copies) of newspapers exist? Were there any stories about her
marriage? Was there an obituary printed
at her death? To find out, my choice is
to take a trip back to Guthrie and research myself (not likely), hire a
researcher to take a peek for me, or count on the good graces of a kind library
staff to check for me and tell me how I can get copies of the articles.
To give Blanche more of a “self” it will be worth a few
dollars spent in the hunt. Lurking in
the back of my mind, of course, is that maybe none of these things exist….and
then what?
In genealogy, strange things can happen. One time early on I received an envelope in
the mail from someone whose name I didn’t recognize. I opened it up and out fell a carte de visite photograph of my
great-grandmother, Nancy Dobbins. It
seems that a lady in El Paso was the great-granddaughter of Nancy’s sister
Olivia. Being the youngest child of the
family, Olivia had retained all the old family photographs and albums, and
perhaps being the most prescient of them, had thought to label each one that
she knew. That box of photographs had
been passed down to the youngest daughter of each generation, finally resting
with the lady in El Paso. The El Paso
lady was herself a genealogist and tracked me down to deliver that photo by
mail.
So I never can discount that something totally unexpected
will happen and Blanche will become a real person again. But for the time being, I’m keeping my fingers
crossed that the traditional ways of turning up facts will once again produce
good stuff and that Blanche will become better known to all of us Stevenses.
