♂Edward Day Curtis

Edward Day Curtis (3 November 1880 – 15 April 1966) was an American teacher of the classics, born at Syracuse, New York, who taught at the state normal school at Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and was later a member of the classics department of the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He was the only surviving son of the pianist and composer Frank Lionel Curtis (1855–1934) and Eunice Adeline Curtis (1854–1923), a grandson of Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896) and Annis Wheaton (1827–1883), and a nephew of Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922), grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

He was born in Syracuse, where the census that year described his father as a professor of piano, and he carried his grandfather’s middle name, Day. A younger brother, Kenneth, died in 1885 before his first birthday. In 1892 the New York state census found Edward and his mother in her parents’ household in Brooklyn, without his father; by 1900 the three were together again in Syracuse, where the census that June listed Edward in his father’s household.

Lock Haven and marriage

By 1911 he was an instructor at the Lock Haven State Normal School. On Saturday, 1 July 1911, at noon in the bride’s home at Lock Haven, he married Emma Shriner, the eldest daughter of the Rev. Dr. Wilford P. Shriner, a Methodist Episcopal minister, who performed the ceremony himself. The newspaper notice of the wedding described the groom as a native of Syracuse who had recently resigned from the Lock Haven school to become head of the classical department of the state normal school at Cortland, New York.

The couple had four children, three daughters and a son, born between about 1913 and 1919: Eunice, born in Pennsylvania; Wilford, who shared his maternal grandfather’s given name; Jane, born at Yonkers, New York, on 15 April 1916; and Barbara, born at Yonkers on 19 October 1919. Edward registered for the draft of the First World War at Yonkers, naming his wife as his next of kin, and the census of 1920 found the family there, in the city’s 8th Ward.

Lawrenceville

By 1930 the family had moved to Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, the home of the Lawrenceville School; Emma’s mother, Willie A. Shriner, was living with them, and their son was no longer in the household. The family was still at Lawrenceville in 1935 and 1940, and Edward registered there for the draft of 1942, when he was sixty-one. In June 1943 he and Emma, “of Rosehill House, Lawrenceville”, announced their daughter Eunice’s engagement to a member of the school’s English department; the notice described Edward as a member of the classics department of the Lawrenceville School, and his daughter Barbara’s obituary of 2006 remembered him as a faculty member there.

Later life and death

By 1950 Edward, then sixty-nine, and Emma were living at Stockton Springs, Waldo County, Maine. He later moved to Media, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where his daughter Barbara was for many years head of the public library, and he filed a Social Security claim there in December 1965. According to the Social Security death indexes, he died on 15 April 1966, in Delaware County. No obituary of his own has been found. His daughters Jane and Barbara both died in 2006, three weeks apart, and each obituary named him as her father.

Notes

Only the census of 1900 names Frank Lionel and Eunice Curtis as his parents. The identification of the man who died in 1966 with their son rests on the exact birth date, 3 November 1880, which appears on both of his draft registrations and in the Social Security records and agrees with the “November 1880” of the 1900 census, together with the unbroken record of Edward D. Curtis and his wife Emma S. from Yonkers to Lawrenceville to Maine.

The wedding notice calls the bride “Emma E. Shriner”; the censuses call her Emma S. The censuses of 1920 and 1930 give her birthplace as Virginia and that of 1950 as New York. An obituary of an Edward D. Curtis published in 1976 concerns a different man.