♂George L. Curtis

George L. Curtis (8 September 1852 – 28 November 1935) was a farmer’s son from Ohio who spent nearly eighty years in the Saginaw valley of Michigan and, in later life, was postmaster of Birch Run and a county poor commissioner. He was a son of Truman Curtis (1804–1885) and Barbara Ferguson (1825–1904), and a nephew of Waterman Curtis (1793–1859), the great-great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

George L. Curtis was born on 8 September 1852 at Willoughby, Lake County, Ohio. The family left Ohio for Michigan in the later 1850s: in 1860 it was living in Arbela Township, Tuscola County, and by 1870 it had settled on a farm in Birch Run Township, Saginaw County. He grew up in a large household with his brothers Charles, Albert and John and his sister Ella. In 1880 he was still at home on his father’s farm, a single man of 27 working as a farmer.

Marriage and family

On 6 April 1881, at Springfield, Oakland County, he married Elizabeth A. Anderson, who appears in the marriage return as “M. Lizzie Anderson” and was a native of Springfield. Their son Floyd J. Curtis was born on 25 January 1887 at Mount Morris, in Genesee County. An index of Michigan county births records a second son born to George and Lizzie Curtis in 1892, registered without a given name; he was not in the household in 1900, and George’s obituary calls Floyd the couple’s only son. By 1900 the family was back in Birch Run, where George headed the household with Elizabeth and thirteen-year-old Floyd.

Floyd married in 1909 and was farming at Birch Run the following year. He died at Flint on 15 August 1927, aged 40, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery at Clio.

Public life

About 1910 George and Elizabeth moved from the farm into the village of Birch Run, where they lived for the rest of his life. His obituary records that he held “several offices of trust”: the postmastership of Birch Run; five years as poor commissioner of Saginaw County, the county office that administered relief to the destitute; and the post of jury commissioner from 1926 through 1929.

Death

George L. Curtis died at his home in Birch Run early on Thursday, 28 November 1935, aged 83, after an illness of six weeks. His death certificate names his parents as Truman Curtis and Barbara Ferguson and records him as married. The Saginaw News reported his death the next day under the headline “George L. Curtis, 83, Former Official, Dies”, noting that he had been 79 years a resident of the Saginaw valley. He was survived by his wife and by his brother John Curtis of Pontiac. After a funeral at the Birch Run Methodist Protestant church on Sunday, 1 December, he was buried at Clio, the town where his son lay; the newspaper names only “Clio cemetery”.

Notes

The obituary states that he came to Birch Run Township with his parents about four years after his birth, that is, about 1856. The censuses place the move somewhat later: a brother was born in Ohio about 1856 or 1857 and the next in Michigan about 1858 or 1859, and in 1860 the family was in Tuscola County rather than Birch Run. The 1909 marriage record indexes Floyd as “Lloyd Curtis”, born 1887 at Mount Morris to George Curtis and Lizzie Anderson; every other detail matches Floyd, and the two names belong to one man. No record of Elizabeth’s death has been found.