♀Jerusha Curtis

Jerusha Curtis (a family tree gives her birth as September 1828) was a New York woman who bore six children and, by 1900, was a widow living in her son’s home at Earlville. She was the great-grand-aunt of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), and she is given as the sister of his great-grandfather Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896).

Early life

A family tree gives her birth as September 1828, which no record documents. She was the third of the eight children of Waterman Curtis (1793–1859) and Thirza Day (born 1802). The family lived at Norwich, in Chenango County, until about 1831, when it moved to Smyrna in the same county. She is not in her parents’ household at Smyrna in the census of 1850, when she was 21, or in the state census of 1855, when she was 26.

A son at seventeen

On 3 January 1846 she had a son at Smyrna, Silas Harvey Chapman. By 1855 the boy was living with his grandparents, and he was still in his grandmother’s house in 1860, with neither parent present; the records do not explain why. He enlisted on 11 January 1864, eight days after his eighteenth birthday, in the 1st New York Mounted Rifles, and the town clerk’s register of men who served names Jerusha Curtis as his mother. After about ten months he fell ill and died on 16 November 1864 at the base hospital at Point of Rocks, Virginia, during the siege of Petersburg^W.

Marriage to James A. Young

Jerusha is listed as the wife of James A. Young (1822–1889), though his birth date is also given as 7 April 1826. The couple were recorded at Sherburne, Chenango County, in the state censuses of 1855 and 1875, and their children included Adis E. (born about 1854), Alonzo (born June 1857) and Frank D. A marriage record of 1925 names Adis’s parents as James Youngs and Jerosha Curtis, and one of 1921 names Frank’s mother as Juricia Curtis.

James died in 1889. In the census of 2 June 1900 Jerusha, aged 71 and a widow, was living at Earlville, in the town of Sherburne, as “mother” in the household of her son Alonzo, a coal dealer. She told the enumerator she had borne six children and that five were living. Four of the six are named, Silas among them. Her death is given as 1900 in Chenango County, but without a record.

Notes

Names and places

The census writes the family Youngs; Young is used here. Her birth is placed at Smyrna, and that place is filed under Madison County, but Smyrna is in Chenango County, and her parents were then at Norwich. A family-history book indexed on Ancestry gives her birth as 16 December 1827 at Lebanon, New York; the 1900 census agrees with September 1828.

Her parents’ birthplace

The 1900 census gives New York as the birthplace of both her parents. Waterman’s entry in the 1860 mortality schedule gives Massachusetts, and the 1900 census gives Rhode Island as the birthplace of her sister Maria’s father.

Silas’s father

No father is named for Silas Harvey Chapman: the father’s name on the town clerk’s register cannot be made out with confidence, and no other record settles it.

Her death

A death in 1900 is given for her, but it rests on no record. An index of burials lists a Jerusha Curtis buried in Madison County in 1870, which cannot be this woman if she was living in June 1900; it may be another person.