♀Emily Josephine Phipps

Emily Josephine Phipps (23 November 1868 – 12 April 1919) was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of English immigrants. She was the grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990).

Early life

Her parents, William Bennett Phipps (1827–1898) and Emily Eliza Morgan (1838–1895), had both been born in England — he baptized at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, she probably at Lambeth. Her father had lived in Brooklyn, and by 1860 the couple were at Greenville, North Carolina; they then settled in Chicago, where he worked as an upholsterer. In 1870 the family lived in Chicago’s Eighth Ward. Emily was the second of three daughters, between Lilian (born about 1862 in North Carolina) and Elizabeth (born February 1870 in Chicago). In 1880, at twelve, she was still at school in the family’s Chicago household.

Marriage and family

On 11 October 1899, in Lake County, Illinois, she married Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922), who had grown up in upstate New York, at Utica and Syracuse, before settling in Chicago. They had two children, Bessie Wheaton Curtis (1901–1980) and Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990); the 1910 census, taken ten years into the marriage, recorded both as still living. By then the family kept a household in Chicago’s Thirty-Second Ward. A transcription of the 1900 census, taken a year after the wedding, places the couple at Hegewisch, in Hyde Park Township on Chicago’s far south side.

Death

Emily Josephine Phipps died at her home, 7532 Perry Avenue, Chicago, on 12 April 1919, of myocarditis and nephritis, and was buried three days later at Oak Woods Cemetery, where her mother had most likely been buried. Her death certificate, on her husband’s information, named her mother as “Emily E. Morgan”, born in England, and her father, also born in England, as Wm. B. Phipps.

Notes

The date and county of the 1899 marriage come from the Illinois marriage index. Her mother’s burial at Oak Woods rests on the Cook County deaths index. The certificate’s “Phipls” for her father’s surname is a slip for Phipps.

A public FamilySearch profile for her parents’ family lists a son, Adolph Phipps, born 1872; the 1880 census, however, shows only the three daughters in the household, with no son present at an age he would have been enumerated. That profile appears to combine this family with an unrelated Phipps household of the same surname, and the supposed son is not accepted here.