♂Lauren Curtis

Lauren Curtis (28 March 1835 – 14 December 1865) was a farm laborer of Smyrna, New York, who served in the 1st New York Mounted Rifles^W in the Civil War and died, his gravestone gives, on 14 December 1865, six years to the day after his father was killed by a falling tree. 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).

Early life

The tree places Lauren’s birth at Norwich, Chenango County, and he grew up on his father’s farm at Smyrna. In 1850 he was fifteen and entered as a farmer. In 1855 he was twenty and still at home, in a household that held his parents, his sisters Almira and Maria, his brother Junia and a nine-year-old nephew, Silas Harvey Chapman, the son of his sister Jerusha.

After their father’s death in December 1859, Lauren, by then twenty-five, worked as a farm laborer in his widowed mother’s house. Junia, aged nineteen, and Silas, aged fourteen, lived there too.

The army

Lauren enlisted in the 1st New York Mounted Rifles in January 1864. His nephew Silas, then eighteen, enlisted in the same regiment that month, on 11 January at Hamilton, in Madison County. Silas died on 16 November 1864 in the base hospital at Point of Rocks, Virginia. His muster record states that his remains were interred at Point of Rocks. Lauren outlived the war.

Death

He died, his gravestone gives, on 14 December 1865, aged thirty, and was buried at Earlville Cemetery in Earlville, Madison County, next to his father. His gravestone gives his name as Lorin Curtis, of the 1st N.Y. Mounted Rifles, with his birth on 28 March 1835 and his death on 14 December 1865. The records give neither a place nor a cause of death.

Notes

Name

The tree spells his name Lauren. The state census of 1855 has him as Lorrain, the census of 1860 as Lorin, and the stone as Lorin. The matching birth and death dates on the stone are what tie the soldier to the son of Waterman and Thirza.

Birthplace

The tree places his birth at Norwich. The 1855 state census gives his parents twenty-four years’ residence at Smyrna, which would put the household at Smyrna from about 1831; the censuses give his birthplace only as Chenango County.