Local family gives birth to first girl in 106 years

Until this week, a girl hadn’t been born in the Tener family since the Roosevelt administration.

As in Teddy Roosevelt.

But at 2:11 p.m. Tuesday, the Clark County family with an overabundance of Y chromosomes did the unthinkable — one of them gave birth to a daughter.

Emma Mae Tener, the first Tener girl born in 106 years, by everybody’s guess, was born to Shauna and Jason Tener at Springfield Regional Medical Center.

Even though an ultrasound predicted Emma’s gender, Jason Tener’s grandfather, Lowell Tener, refused to believe it.

“He kept calling it an X-ray,” Jason Tener, 31, said. “He said, ‘That X-ray is wrong.’ He said, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’”

After Tuesday, the only thing left in question was how far back, in fact, the last Tener girl was born.

“Your great-great-grandpa would be the one who had a girl,” Shauna Tener, 31, explained to her husband Wednesday as they debated how many “greats” it went back.

It’s believed there hasn’t been a Tener girl born — the only female Teners are the ones the boys marry — since about 1907.

The Model T was yet to be built. A place called Fort Lee, N.J., was the movie capital of the world, not Hollywood (and movies were silent and only about 10 minutes in length).

Emma, who weighed in at 10 pounds, is Shauna and Jason Tener’s third child. Naturally, the other two are boys — 6-year-old, Caleb, and 4-year-old, Aiden.

Shauna Tener, an emergency room nurse at Springfield Regional, never thought she’d have a girl being married to a Tener.

“It’s always been a joke,” she said.

The wife of Jason Tener’s brother will be next to give birth, in June.

“I’ll bet money it’s a boy,” said Jason Tener, a volunteer Hustead firefighter who works at Esterline and Sons Manufacturing.

But, for right now, Caleb Tener can look at his new baby sister and say something that hasn’t been said in more than a century.

“She’s cute,” he said.

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