♀Annis Wheaton

Annis Wheaton (27 October 1827 – 15 May 1883) was a New York woman from Chenango County, left fatherless before she was four, who married the printer and newspaper editor Thomas Day Curtis and followed him from Manhattan to Brooklyn, Smyrna, Utica and Syracuse. By June 1865 the state census recorded that she had already borne ten children, and the family record counts fourteen in all. She was the great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922) and his son Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990).

Early life

Annis Wheaton was born on 27 October 1827 at New Berlin, Chenango County, New York, the daughter of Samuel Wheaton and Salena Sherman. Her father died “a natural death” at New Berlin, Chenango County, on 17 October 1831, without a will. In January 1832 her mother, called Celena Wheaton in the Surrogate’s Court at Oxford, took out letters of administration on an estate valued at no more than four hundred dollars, and the court named her guardian of the two surviving children, Annis and her younger sister, Elenor F. Wheaton, both “minors under the age of fourteen years”. Each girl’s share of the estate was put at under one hundred dollars. Her mother died in 1842, when Annis was about fourteen.

Elenor never married. She lived on in Otsego and Chenango counties, was listed in 1900 as an “inmate” at Preston, where the Chenango County almshouse stood, and died at Preston on 23 December 1907.

Marriage and family

Annis married Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896), a native of Norwich, at Norwich; a family compilation gives the year as 1846. By June 1850 the couple were living in the Eighth Ward of Manhattan, where Thomas worked as a printer, with an infant son, Alphonse. In 1860 they were in the 16th Ward of Brooklyn, Thomas a clerk, with four children at home. By 1863 they had moved back to Chenango County, to Smyrna, where the 1865 state census listed Thomas as a farmer and gave Annis’s count of ten children born.

The family then followed Thomas’s newspaper work. The 1870 census found them in the Third Ward of Utica, Thomas an editor and publisher and Annis keeping house, with nine children, the youngest the one-year-old Hubert Orestes. In 1875 they were at Syracuse, where Thomas edited a weekly paper, and in 1880 they were back at Utica, Thomas a journalist and Annis again keeping house, with six of the younger children at home. Several of the children died young. A son, very probably theirs, was born and died on 20 July 1872 at Utica and was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery there. Two of the sons, George Day and Albert Waterman, carried family surnames as middle names, and a grandson was named William Wheaton Curtis after her.

Annis Wheaton Curtis died at her home, No. 2 East Fayette Place in Syracuse, on 15 May 1883, aged 55, leaving her husband and nine children. A Find a Grave memorial places her burial in Oakwood Cemetery there. Four years later, on 16 August 1887, Thomas married Hattie J. Ray at Chicago; Ray was the surname of an earlier marriage, since a Milwaukee newspaper item of February 1896 calls a Dr. Ray of that city Thomas’s stepson. Thomas died at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1896.

Notes

The Syracuse Standard’s death notice, reprinted in the Rome Daily Sentinel of 16 May 1883, says she was “born at New Berlin, Chenango county”, and a Find a Grave memorial agrees; no record found names Norwich as her birthplace. The notice gives her age as 56, but her birth date of 27 October 1827 makes her 55. The nine children it names are all of the family’s fourteen who were then living.

The census takers wrote her name several ways: “Annis W.” in 1850 and 1880, “Annus” in 1860, “Anna W.” in 1870 and “Anis W.” in 1875. Her mother’s maiden name, Sherman, is not stated in the probate papers, which call her only Celena Wheaton. Her son Orcus’s 1920 marriage record at Los Angeles gives his mother as “Annis Wheaton Sherman”, the only record found that attaches the surname Sherman to her.

Records account for eight children born before June 1865, against the ten that census reported. Three children in the family record (Alfred, born about 1849, and two daughters, Salenia and Cristabel) appear in no record found. In 1860 the only young daughter at home was a girl called Flora, aged two, in the place the family record gives to Salenia. No record of the deaths of the children who died young has been found in the New York City death indexes or at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.