♀Mary Alice Harvey

Mary Alice Harvey (26 January 1854 – 10 July 1941) was an Illinois woman who spent her whole life of eighty-seven years at Mount Carmel, Wabash County, where she was the wife of the hardware merchant J. Fred Stein. She married on Christmas Day 1873, and twenty-five years later her eldest son married on Christmas Day as well. She was the elder sister of Julia Esther Harvey (1857–1951), the great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Early life

She was born at Mount Carmel on 26 January 1854, the daughter of the physician James Harvey (1821–1896) and Eleanor Tougas Lovellette (1830–1898). She was one of their seven children, born between 1850 and 1870. The census of 1860 lists her in her parents’ household as Mary A., aged 6, and that of 1870 as Alice, aged 16; she went by her middle name, and a county marriage index of 1898 calls her “Allie”.

Marriage and family

On 25 December 1873 she married J. Fred Stein (1852–1923) in Wabash County. The couple had four children, born between 1875 and 1888: Clarence, Claude Harvey, Roy Harold and Mabel Alice. Roy died in 1904, aged about twenty. By 1898 her husband ran a hardware business at Mount Carmel under the name J. Fred Stein & Son, with Clarence as the junior partner, and in December of that year a local paper announced Clarence’s marriage to Eva Fogerty, to be held at the bride’s parents’ house on 25 December, exactly twenty-five years after his parents’ own wedding. The censuses of 1900, 1910 and 1920 find Mary Alice at Mount Carmel in her husband’s household.

Two newspaper items show her among her brothers and sisters. In August 1906, when her sister Ella’s husband, John S. White, died at Seattle, a Springfield newspaper recorded that “B. A. Harvey and Mrs. Stein of Mt. Carmel”, her brother Beauchamp Augustus and herself, came to Springfield to join the family for the funeral. In June 1908 it was her husband who received the telegram from Deming, New Mexico, reporting that her youngest brother, Orian Ross Harvey, had died there of tuberculosis; the obituary that followed named her first among his surviving brothers and sisters, as “Mrs. J. Fred Stein”.

Widowhood and death

Her husband died in 1923. She lived on at Mount Carmel as a widow for eighteen years, heading her own household in the censuses of 1930 and 1940. She died at Mount Carmel on 10 July 1941, aged 87, and was buried there two days later; her estate was probated in Wabash County. The cemetery memorial of her daughter Mabel gives the parents as John Frederick “Fred” Stein, 1852–1923, and Mary Alice Harvey Stein, 1854–1941.