♀Maria Curtis

Maria Curtis (born about 1831) was a farmer’s daughter of Chenango County, New York, who was left a widow with a small son and was in the household of her unmarried brother Junia in 1870 and 1900. She was the great-grand-aunt of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), and the tree makes her the sister of his great-grandfather Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896).

Early life

Maria was born in Chenango County about 1831, the fourth of the eight children of Waterman Curtis (1793–1859) and Thirza Day (born 1802); the tree places her birth at Norwich, where the family lived until it moved to Smyrna about that year. At Smyrna on 7 June 1855 she was 24, one of seven people in her father’s household: her parents, her sister Almira, her brothers Lauren and Junia, and a nine-year-old grandson, Silas Harvey Chapman, the son of her sister Jerusha.

Marriage and widowhood

The tree names her husband as DeWitt C. Nash, and their son Lewis W. Nash was born in July 1862. In 1860, after her father’s death, a DeWitt C. Nash, aged 33, and a Nash woman of 30 were living in her widowed mother’s household at Smyrna. By the state census of 1 June 1865 Maria was a widow, entered as Mariah Nash, aged 35, married once and the mother of one child. She was then at Hamilton, in Madison County, in the same dwelling as her mother and Junia, but as a family of her own with Lewis, aged two.

Later years

In 1870, still at Hamilton, she was 40 and a housekeeper in Junia’s home, with Lewis, seven. Thirty years later the three were at Pompey, in Onondaga County: Junia, a single farm laborer of 59, headed the household, and the census listed Maria D. Nash, 69, as his widowed sister and Lewis, 37, a single farm laborer, as his nephew. She told the enumerator she had borne one child and that he was living. In 1910 Junia and Lewis are in the household, and Maria is not; the tree has no date or place for her death.

Notes

Birth and name

The 1900 census gives her birth as July 1830; the state censuses of 1855, 1865 and 1870 give ages that point to 1830 or 1831, and the tree has about 1831.

Her husband

The tree names a husband, DeWitt C. Nash; no marriage record is known. New York required no civil registration of marriages before 1880. A compiled burial listing gives a DeWitt Clinton Nash (1826–1863) at Earlville Cemetery with no wife or children named; whether he is the same man is not known. Maria’s widowhood is stated by the 1865 census itself, so he died before 1 June 1865.

Her father’s birthplace

The 1900 census gives Rhode Island as the birthplace of both Maria’s father and her brother Junia’s. Waterman’s entry in the 1860 mortality schedule gives Massachusetts.