New William Bennett Phipps (Curtis line)

William Bennett Phipps is Frederic Roger Curtis’s great-grandfather: four steps back, all of them documented. William died in Chicago in 1898 and Roger was born there in 1928, so the two ends of the chain missed each other by thirty years, though every other pair in it overlapped. The line runs from William and his wife Emily to their daughter Emily Josephine, who married Hubert Orestes Curtis; to their son Frederic Arthur Curtis; and to Roger.

For a long time William was a named dead end. We had a man born about 1827 in England, a wife called Emily Eliza Morgan with nothing behind the name, three daughters, and a death in Chicago on 9 March 1898. Neither he nor his wife had a single parent recorded. Then a baptism turned up in Stratford-upon-Avon, and after it a letter he wrote from a prison camp, and most of what we thought we knew needed fixing.

The baptism

The Stratford-upon-Avon register gives the beginning of him: 28 May 1827, William Bennett, son of John Phipps, upholsterer, and Elizabeth. A father with a trade, and a mother with no surname.

The surname was in his own name the whole time. English families often gave a son his mother’s maiden surname as a middle name, and John Phipps married an Elizabeth Bennett at Stratford on 28 February 1826. She was buried on 29 May 1837, aged 32, when William was ten. His father remarried eighteen months later, and that second marriage entry names his own father in turn, another William Phipps, one generation further back than we had.

What he wrote

Between the English baptism and a man standing in North Carolina there was a thirty-three-year gap, with nothing to say what he did in the war except an inscription on a gravestone. His army file filled it. Of the seventeen pages in it, one is in his own hand: a petition written at Point Lookout, Maryland, on 7 April 1865, five days after his capture outside Petersburg, to the general in charge of prisoners.

“I wish to avail myself of the opportunity of taking the oath of allegiance to the United States Government. If it is required of me to do it again, I was conscripted three years ago by the Confederate Government. I have never violated the oath I then took only under compulsion. I am an Englishman by birth and took the oath of Allegiance to the United States on the 8th day of October 1856 in the county court of Kings, Brooklyn, L.I., and was captured near Petersburg on the 2nd day of April 1865 from Co. C, 44th North Carolina Troops.” — W. B. Phipps, 44th Regt. Co. C

Two days after he wrote this, Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He had no way of knowing. They held him another ten weeks and released him on 16 June 1865 on the oath he had asked for, the second time in his life he swore it.

Three things in that letter were new to us. He names the court, the county and the exact day he became an American citizen, which nobody in the family knew had happened. He places himself in Brooklyn in 1856, a city we had never thought to look in. And because five years’ residence was required before naturalisation, he must have arrived in America around 1851, the first date we have for the crossing. The clerk who processed his release also wrote down what he looked like: light complexion, greyish hair, dark eyes, five feet eight and three-quarters. No photograph of anyone in this branch from that generation is known, so the clerk’s description is the only account of his appearance we have.

His life, as we have it

• 1826 His parents marry at Stratford-upon-Avon.
• 1827 William is baptised there, fifteen months after the wedding, the son of an upholsterer.
• 1837 His mother is buried, aged 32.
• about 1851 He crosses to America, aged about twenty-four. This is worked out backwards from the citizenship; the crossing itself has not been found.
• 1856 He becomes an American citizen at the county court in Brooklyn.
• 1860 Greenville, Pitt County, North Carolina, working as an upholsterer. Emily is written in beneath him with a ditto mark for the surname, which is how we know they were already married.
• 1862 He enters the Confederate army, Company C of the 44th North Carolina, signed up in Pitt County “for the War”. A private on every document but one.
• 1862–1864 Present at six roll calls over two and a half years, never sick, absent or on leave. Issued clothing in August and November 1864.
• 1865 Captured near Petersburg on 2 April as the lines broke; released on 16 June after swearing allegiance, giving Greenville as his home.
• 1870 Chicago. Somewhere in the five years after the war he left the South. Nothing we have explains the move.
• 1892 He registers to vote in Cook County.
• 1898 He dies in Chicago, about seventy, leaving three daughters: Lilian, Emily Josephine and Elizabeth.

The one thing the file cannot settle

His own letter and his own army’s paperwork disagree about how he came to serve, and they were written three years apart by people with no reason to compare notes. A card in his file from 1862 records him as a substitute, a man paid to go in place of someone else who had been called up. His letter of 1865 says he was conscripted. The letter was written to the man holding him prisoner, while asking that man for a favour, so he had every reason to say he had been forced; that is why we cannot simply take it, and also why it might still be true. “Three years ago” is very nearly right: June 1862 to April 1865 is two years and ten months. Both versions are written down and neither is preferred.

What we had to unlearn

• The gravestone is not evidence that he fought. The online memorial that says so was posted by an account that has put up more than sixty-five thousand of them, with no photograph, no source and no family named. His service is proved from the army’s own roll calls instead.
• He was not a sergeant. Six roll calls, the file cover and the release card all say private. “Sgt.” appears once, scribbled in a notes column on a prisoner list.
• His wife’s name is not proven. Neither “Eliza” nor “Morgan” is backed by a record made in her lifetime. Everything attached to her is American, comes after the wedding, and calls her Emily Phipps. “Morgan” appears on her daughters’ death certificates, decades after her own death: one of them reported by a son-in-law who married into the family four years after Emily died and never met her, and Elizabeth’s, of 1941, which gives the mother as “Emily C. Morgan”, born in England, with a middle initial that matches nothing else we hold. The daughters agreed on the surname; nobody who knew Emily before her marriage wrote it down.

What we still do not know

• The Brooklyn citizenship papers. He gave us the court, the county and the day. The record should exist, and it would say how he spelled his name on arrival and possibly which port and ship.
• Who Emily really was. No marriage record has been found under any spelling, in either state.
• Why Greenville. The town in 1860 held a coach maker, a coach trimmer, an upholsterer and a stage driver, all English and all recently arrived. A coach-building business is very probably what drew them.
• Why Chicago. A man who fought for the South left it within five years of the surrender and spent thirty years in a northern city. Nothing explains the decision.

Every date here comes from a record we have read, apart from the arrival of about 1851, which is worked out rather than documented. The army card gives his age as 37 when his baptism makes him 35; ages on old paperwork are somebody's estimate.