♀Hattie J. Ray

Hattie J. Ray was the second wife of Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896), great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) through Thomas’s son Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922). A compiled Cook County index gives her marriage to him at Chicago in 1887, when he was 63, and she went with him to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where he died in 1896.

Marriage

Thomas had been a widower since the death of Annis Wheaton at Syracuse on 15 May 1883. A Cook County marriage index gives his second marriage as 16 August 1887 at Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States, to Harriet J. Ray, known here as Hattie. It gives her age as 51, which would put her birth about 1836, and his as 63. The marriage is the only one known for her. No children of the marriage are recorded. Her parents and her birthplace are not given, and no record names her birth or death.

Her son and Fond du Lac

Ray was probably not her maiden name. When Thomas died at Fond du Lac on 5 February 1896, the Milwaukee Daily News of 8 February reported that “Dr. C. F. Ray returned from Fond du Lac today, where he attended the funeral of his stepfather, the late Colonel T. D. Curtis”. That evidently makes Dr. Ray a son of Hattie by an earlier marriage, already grown when she married Thomas, and it makes Ray her married surname from that earlier marriage. Her maiden name is not known.

After the wedding the couple lived at Fond du Lac, where Thomas was called “a prominent resident” in the Wisconsin papers. No record of Hattie after the funeral is known, and the date and place of her own death are unknown.

Notes

A FamilySearch tree entry gives the marriage as 1888 at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The Chicago date and place of 16 August 1887, which the Cook County index gives, are the ones used here. The original record is restricted, and the event’s citation also names a Wisconsin place, so the conflict is open.