♀Emily Eliza Morgan

Emily Eliza Morgan (about 1838 – 20 October 1895) kept house in North Carolina and Chicago as the wife of an English-born upholsterer. She was the great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Emily Josephine Phipps (1868–1919), whose son was Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990), Roger’s father.

Early life

She was probably the Emily Eliza Morgan born on 23 March 1838 and baptized on 25 December 1838 at St John the Evangelist, Lambeth, Surrey, the daughter of James Morgan (born about 1800), a London dyer of York Street, and his wife Esther (born about 1803). She was one of at least seven children baptized to James and Esther Morgan; the registers place the family at Bury Street, St James’s, Westminster, in the 1820s and early 1830s and at York Street by 1838. In 1841 the family lived in the neighboring parish of Christchurch, Surrey, and by 1851 at High Holborn, London, where her father still worked as a dyer.

Marriage and family

By 1 June 1860 Emily was already living as the wife of William Bennett Phipps, an upholsterer from Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, in a two-person household at Greenville, Pitt County, North Carolina. The couple later settled in Chicago, and by 1870 they lived in the city’s 8th Ward, where Emily kept house and William worked as an upholsterer. They had three daughters, Lilian, Emily Josephine and Elizabeth, the eldest born in North Carolina and the two younger in Chicago. In 1880 the family was still in Chicago, Emily keeping house as William’s wife.

Death

She died in Chicago on 20 October 1895, by the county’s death index, and was buried at Oak Woods Cemetery. William survived her, dying on 9 March 1898.

Notes

Parentage

Every record naming Emily after her marriage calls her Emily Phipps, so her maiden name and parentage rest on a baptism rather than on a document in which she herself appears under that name. The Lambeth christening — Emily Eliza, born 23 March 1838, daughter of James and Esther Morgan, a dyer of York Street, baptized 25 December 1838 — matches her on both given names and on the year. The 1841 census at Christchurch, Surrey, lists James Morgan, a dyer, aged 42, with his wife Hester and a daughter Emily whose age is written only as initials; the 1851 census, at High Holborn, lists James, a dyer aged 51, his wife Esther, aged 48, and an Emily aged 15, born at Christchurch. The link is probable rather than proven: Morgan was a common surname in 1830s London, and the 1851 census makes her about two years older than the baptism does. A son Henry, ten months old in 1841, was baptized in 1840 to the same parents at the same York Street address and in the same trade, which confirms the 1841 age; the seventeen given for him in 1851 is an error in the census index. A death certificate for her daughter Elizabeth gives the mother as “Emily C. Morgan”, which supports the surname but has not been reconciled with “Eliza”.

Birth year, marriage and death

Her age of 22 on the 1860 census and the Cook County death index both place her birth about 1838; the 1870 and 1880 censuses give ages that would put it about 1842. In 1860 she is entered under the ditto mark for her husband’s surname. No record of the marriage itself, English or American, is known; a London marriage of 1885 at Wandsworth belongs to a different William Phipps, an engineer. The 1880 census gives Lilian’s birthplace as North Carolina; the 1870 census gives another state. Her death date and her burial at Oak Woods come from the Cook County deaths index.