Tressy's Secret

(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

When a stranger named Mandy Haggerty contacted me out of the blue to tell me that her grandfather was Theresia Chester's illegitimate child, I was astonished. Tressy? Who would ever have thought…?

But the birth certificate is easy enough to find, if only I had known to go look for it. I wonder that I did not stumble across it before in all these years of research.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image from Ancestry.com.

The father, George Peterson, was born December 24, 1888, somewhere in Wisconsin (sources vary). His parents, Danish immigrants, were farmers (1900 Census, and I am relying on Mandy's research for his background, since a guy with a name like George Peterson — well, you have to have a special interest in him to do the work of separating him from all the other George Petersons). At about 20 years of age George married for the first time and had a child; the 1910 Census shows him living in Chicago with his in-laws. I do not know what became of that marriage. George somehow found his way down to Ross Township. When the Great War broke out and he had to complete his draft card on June 5, 1917, he described himself as single (WWI Draft Cards). He was working as a hired hand on the farm of Nicholas Fleck, Jr.

Living in Ross Township, he not surprisingly came to know Tressy Chester. She was about ten years his junior.

What is surprising about this episode is that throughout the late autumn of 1917, and the winter and spring of 1918, none of the local papers mentioned a word about Charles Chester's taking any legal action against his daughter's seducer — or even illegal action, as might be the first impulse of the hot-headed Charles.

To his credit, Charles apparently did not do anything against his pregnant daughter, either. It was probably under his roof, on May 14, 1918, that George Jr. was born. As noted on the birth certificate, George Sr. was then residing back in his home state, Wisconsin.

We have no way of knowing how Tressy felt about giving her child up for adoption. The fact that birth certificate recorded a name rather than just "baby boy" would suggest emotional attachment — but I ought not to subject Tressy to my amateur psychologizing.

At that time and place, of course, her keeping the child as a single mother would have come at a very heavy social cost. As to letting her parents raise the child as their own — as the Ols family had done with little Lela — well, Charles and Constance were both about 46 years old at that time; I suppose they could have brazened it out if they'd really wanted to. But that didn't happen.

The child having been adopted out, Tressy's life resumed all appearance of normality. As we know, in September 1919 she married Robert Shaw. The ceremony took place in Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. The bride wore white crepe de chine and was attended by her sister, Jennie.[1]

Our knowing what we know now makes it all the more poignant that the first child of that marriage, a little boy names James, died shortly after birth (Cook County, Illinois, Deaths Index). Robert and Tressy went on to have two more sons whom they raised to adulthood.

I wonder if Robert knew about Tressy's first child?

The Chesters kept quiet about it all even within the family, it seems. In contrast to the Ols descendants, to whom the story of Jennie and Lela was just a part of family history, none of the Chester descendants I'm in touch with knew anything about Tressy's secret. The story was equally unknown among the descendants of Tressy's baby. Mandy Haggerty needed an Ancestry.com DNA test, with its suggestions of possible relatives, as well as the help of a "search angel," to figure out that the grandfather she knew as Donald Robert Haggerty had come into the world as George Peterson, Jr.

I will talk about him and his adopted family in a future post.

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[1] "Hobart," The Times (Hammond, Ind.), 5 Sept. 1919.