♂Lorrain Curtis

Lorrain Curtis (born about 1775 – died 15 August 1850) was a miller and innkeeper of Sherburne, Chenango County, New York, where the Sherburne Centennial places him as early as 1799. He was the third great-grand-uncle of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), the brother of his third great-grandfather Jeremiah Curtis (1770–1810).

Early life

Lorrain was one of the seven children of John Curtis (1748–1790) and Mary Filley (1752–1815). A compiled abstract of Connecticut town records gives his birth as 16 September 1775 at Torrington, in the Connecticut Colony. The family had moved to Worthington, in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, by the early 1780s, and his father died there in 1790. A genealogy of Chesterfield, Massachusetts, families records that all of John Curtis’s children later removed to North Norwich, in Chenango County, New York.

At Sherburne

Lorrain’s own settlement was at Sherburne, in the same county. According to the Sherburne Centennial he was a miller. For a time he kept an inn “on the now Talcott Pratt place near the river bridge”, and later he worked the old St. John grist mill near the tannery. He died at Sherburne on 15 August 1850, and a FamilySearch index gives his burial there.

Marriages and family

The Centennial records two marriages. His first wife was Elizabeth Burget, whose mother, Elizabeth Rees, was a sister of the Sherburne pioneers Jacob and William Rees; their son was John. His second wife was Clarisa Lothrop, whose gravestone gives her death on 15 December 1863 at the age of 74 years, 11 months and 21 days, which puts her birth in late December 1788. Their son was Dwight.

The Centennial also follows his son John, a shoemaker in the firm of Curtis & Whitford, who had learned the tanner’s trade on West Hill. In the year his father died, according to the Centennial, John went to California in 1850 and died soon after arriving. The two deaths were in different places and have no recorded connection beyond the year.

Notes

The 1850 census

An index of the 1850 federal census for Sherburne lists “Loran Curtis”, born in 1776 in Massachusetts. The year and the birthplace both differ from the Torrington record; the index is kept here as a variant of his name and age, not as a replacement.

Another Lorain Curtis

A Lorain Curtis aged 20, a son in the household of Waterman Curtis (1793–1859) in the 1855 state census at Smyrna, Chenango County, is a different man: he is Waterman’s son Lauren, born in 1835 and dead in 1865, whose stone is in the cemetery where his father lies.