♂Arthur Lee Curtis

Arthur Lee Curtis (9 March 1867 – 16 February 1955) was an American printer who spent his working life in Chicago, Illinois, first as a typesetter, and who belonged to four Masonic bodies, among them the Normal Park lodge that had conducted the funeral of his younger brother Hubert in 1922. He was a son of Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896) and Annis Wheaton (1827–1883), and an elder brother of Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922), grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

He was born on 9 March 1867 at West Edmeston, New York, while his father, a printer and later a newspaper editor, was moving the family between Chenango County and the cities of central New York. His brother Hubert was born at Utica the next year. At the state census of 1875 Arthur, aged eight, was living with his parents and seven of his brothers and sisters at Syracuse, where his father was then editing a weekly paper. His mother died at Syracuse in 1883, and his father later remarried at Chicago in 1887 before settling in Wisconsin.

Chicago

Arthur went into his father’s trade and settled in Chicago, where his brother Hubert also worked as a printer; their father’s obituary in 1896 named both of them as “of Chicago”. The Chicago Chronicle of 20 November 1895 listed a marriage licence issued the day before to “Arthur Curtis” and “Ellen Elias”, aged 28 and 26, and the couple were married on 20 November 1895. His wife was Helen Johanna Elias, born in 1869. They had three children, among them William Wheaton Curtis (1897–1983), born at Chicago on 8 February 1897, whose middle name was his grandmother Annis’s maiden surname, and Helen Margaret Curtis (1901–1999).

The census of 1900 records Arthur as a typesetter and the head of a household in Chicago’s 21st Ward; in 1920 he was living in the 7th Ward and still working in the printing trade. When his brother Hubert died in December 1922, the Chicago Tribune’s funeral notice named Arthur L. Curtis among the survivors, and when his elder brother Frank Lionel Curtis died in Brooklyn in May 1934, both of Frank’s obituaries named “Arthur Curtis of Chicago”.

Later life and death

His wife died before him, and by 1950 Arthur, a widower of 83, was living with one of his sons at Lakewood, near Crystal Lake in McHenry County, Illinois. He died on 16 February 1955, a few weeks short of his eighty-eighth birthday. His death notice in the Chicago Tribune of 19 February gave him as “of Lakewood, Crystal Lake, Ill.”, the husband of “the late Helen Elias Curtis” and the father of three living children, one of them William, then of Houston, Texas. It listed his Masonic memberships: Normal Park Lodge No. 797, Normal Park Chapter No. 210 of the Royal Arch Masons, Englewood Commandery No. 59 of the Knights Templar, and Imperial Council No. 85 of the Royal and Select Masters. The funeral was held on the afternoon of Saturday, 19 February, at a chapel at 5501 North Ashland Avenue in Chicago, and he was buried in Chicago.

Notes

His place of death is recorded as Dundee, Yates County, New York, on the strength of a newspaper obituary index alone. His death notice gives no place of death, only his residence at Lakewood, and Dundee, Kane County, Illinois, lies about fifteen miles from Crystal Lake; no death record has been found to decide between them. The Tribune notice gave his age as 88, a few weeks more than his birth date allows. No record of his wife’s death has been examined.