♂Donald Emerson James Hilton

Donald Emerson James Hilton (19 October 1900 – 27 January 1954) was a Chicago-born wholesale food salesman who grew up in Brooklyn and spent his last years in West Haven, Connecticut, and whose birth was not registered until 16 February 1942, the same day he registered for the wartime draft at Windsor, Connecticut. He was a second cousin of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007): his grandmother Mary Ada Curtis (1851–1934) was an elder sister of Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922), Roger’s grandfather.

Early life

He was born at Chicago on 19 October 1900, the son of William Bentley Hilton, an Englishman, and Ada Cone Williams, a native of Syracuse, New York, who was Mary Ada Curtis’s only child. His Cook County birth certificate, filed as a delayed registration in 1942, gives his father’s age as 30 and his mother’s as 23. The records do not explain why the birth was registered so late, or why on the same day as his draft registration.

By 1905 his mother had remarried, to John Sähr, a German-born man of Brooklyn, and the state census of that year lists Donald, aged four, as Sähr’s stepson, in a household that also held Sähr’s twelve-year-old son John from an earlier marriage. The 1915 state census finds him in the same household. By January 1920 his stepfather had died, and Donald, then nineteen, was living in Brooklyn with his widowed mother and his grandmother Mary Ada, three generations under one roof.

Marriage and family

The New York City Clerk’s marriage licence index records a licence issued in Brooklyn on 27 August 1923 to Donald Hilton and Helen M. Ferguson. The Brooklyn Times Union printed the licence the next day, giving each of them as 22, Donald living on Vanderbilt Avenue and his bride on Jefferson Avenue. The licence application itself, which would name both sets of parents, has not been seen.

In 1930 the couple were living in Queens, and Donald’s grandmother Mary Ada, then 79, was living with them; the enumerator wrote his name as “Daniel J”. By 1940 they had moved to Connecticut, living at 512 Broad Street, Windsor, when their daughter Margaret Mary Hilton (1940–2018) was born at Hartford Hospital on 7 July 1940. They also had another child. He registered for the draft at Windsor in February 1942, naming Helen Hilton as his contact.

Later life

The 1950 census finds him at West Haven, aged 49, a salesman in the wholesale food trade, with his two children at home. He died at West Haven on 27 January 1954, aged 53, survived by his wife. His daughter’s obituary, more than sixty years later, recalled that she had been preceded in death by her parents, Donald and Helen Hilton.

Notes

The 1930 census gives his marriage as about 1927, an estimate worked from the age at marriage the couple gave the enumerator, and that is the date the family record carries. The 1923 licence, confirmed by both the city’s index and the newspaper list, is four years earlier; a licence records the intention to marry, not the ceremony, and no record of the wedding itself has been found. His father, William Bentley Hilton, has not been traced after 1900.