♂Jeremiah Curtis

Jeremiah Curtis (born 1833) was a young farmer of Smyrna, Chenango County, New York, who was married by the age of twenty-two. He was the great-grand-uncle of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), the brother of Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896), Roger’s great-grandfather. He was the son of Waterman Curtis (1793–1859) and Thirza Day (born 1802).

Life

A family tree gives his birth as 13 March 1833 at Norwich, Chenango County. The date and place rest on the tree alone, but the ages in the censuses fit the year. In July 1850 he was seventeen and entered as a farmer in his father’s household at Smyrna, with his parents, two sisters, his brothers Lauren and Junia, and his grandmother Catherine Dey, then seventy-seven.

By June 1855 he had a household of his own. The state census of that month lists Jeremiah, twenty-two, and his wife Amanda, eighteen, in the house next to his parents’. His parents’ house held his sisters Almira and Maria, his brothers Lauren and Junia and a nine-year-old nephew, Silas Harvey Chapman. The tree records no wife and no children for him, and Amanda’s surname and the date of the marriage are not recorded.

The tree gives his death as 15 April 1856, when he would have been twenty-three. It gives no place, and the date rests on the tree alone.

Notes

An open question

An index to the 1865 state census lists a Jeremiah Curtis, born about 1856, in an Edmeston household headed by a Rathbun with an Amanda Briggs. The index alone does not show whether he was this Jeremiah’s son.