♂Jeremiah Curtis

Jeremiah Curtis (8 April 1770 – after 1810) was a farmer of western Massachusetts and, later, Chenango County, New York. He was the third great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Waterman Curtis (1793–1859).

Early life

Jeremiah Curtis was born in Torrington, Litchfield County, Connecticut, the son of John Curtis (1748–1790) and Mary Filley (1752–1815), who had married there the year before. He was baptized on 19 August 1770; the same church record also gives 26 August, and both dates are preserved rather than resolved. His mother was received into the Torrington church on the same day as his baptism, the ordinary pattern by which a mother joined the church so that her child could be baptized.

By 1790 the family had moved to Worthington, Hampshire County, Massachusetts. Jeremiah appears there that year heading his own household, in the census line next to his widowed mother, Mary; his father had died about September 1790. The family’s surname is written across its own records as Curtis, Curtiss, Curtice and Curtace, and his own 1790 marriage was itself indexed under Curtace, a spelling that has kept it from turning up in searches made under “Curtis” alone.

Marriage and family

Jeremiah Curtis married Mary Morton (1768–1816) on 7 June 1790 in Chesterfield, Hampshire County, Massachusetts (one record gives 31 May instead; a genealogy of Chesterfield families, which also names him as the first child of John and Mary Curtis, independently supports 7 June). The couple’s first child, John, died 25 February 1792 at eleven days old. Four more children followed: Waterman (1793–1859), Junia (1795–1809), Truman (1804–1885) and Electa (1811–1888); Waterman was given his mother’s grandmother’s maiden name, Waterman, a Plymouth Colony family into which her own line married. By 1800 the family was living in Blandford, in the same county, where the census also records two young daughters for whom no birth or other record has since been found.

After 1800 the family removed to North Norwich, in Chenango County, New York; the same Chesterfield genealogy states that all of John Curtis’s children made the same move. Mary Morton’s own family took a letter of dismission from their Massachusetts church to Norwich in January 1801, so the two families, already joined by the 1790 marriage, resettled in the same place within a few years of each other. Junia died there in 1809, not yet fifteen. In 1810 Jeremiah was enumerated as the head of a household at Norwich, the last record of him alive.

Notes

Jeremiah Curtis is last recorded living at Norwich, Chenango County, New York, in the 1810 census (page 223); that entry was read from the census index, and the page image has not been examined. No death date or place has been found beyond that. A memorial at North Norwich Cemetery, Chenango County, gives his birth date exactly as the Connecticut record does but carries no photograph and no date of death, so his burial there rests on the memorial alone. No land or probate record for him has turned up in Chenango County; the same is true of his son Waterman, and the family appears to have held no real estate there in either generation. A Revolutionary War militia record dated July 1779, attached to him on a widely used genealogy website, cannot be his: he was nine years old that year.