♀Mary Ada Curtis

Mary Ada Curtis (about 1851 – 15 October 1934) was a New York woman who married the Syracuse druggist Cone Williams, moved with him to Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1880s, and was widowed there in 1888, spending her last years in her daughter’s and grandson’s homes in Brooklyn and Queens. She was a daughter of Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896) and Annis Wheaton (1827–1883), and an elder sister of Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922), grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

She was born in New York City about 1851, one of the fourteen children the family record gives her parents. She is not in the household her parents kept in Manhattan’s Eighth Ward in June 1850; the 1860 census lists her, aged ten, with the family in Brooklyn, and the state census of 1865 finds her, aged fourteen, at Smyrna in Chenango County. In 1875 she was still living with her parents at Syracuse, where her father was then editing a weekly paper.

Marriage and Florida

About 1876 she became the second wife of Cone Williams (1840–1888), a Civil War veteran born in New Jersey who kept a retail drug business in Syracuse. His first wife had died in 1875, leaving him two daughters, Berdella May and Elizabeth. The couple’s only child, Ada Cone Williams, was born at Syracuse about 1877. The 1880 census shows the household at Syracuse, Cone a druggist, with the three girls at home.

In November 1883 Cone Williams took up two tracts of federal land in Florida, and the state census of 1885 finds the family in Duval County, with Mary Ada, recorded as “Ada Williams”, her husband and all three daughters. Cone Williams died on 17 September 1888 and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Jacksonville. By 1896 she had moved to Chicago: her father’s obituary that year lists “Mrs. Cone Williams” of Chicago among his children. In 1898 she applied from Illinois for a widow’s pension on his Civil War service, under the name Ada C. Williams.

Later life

Her daughter married twice, first at Chicago about 1899 to William Bentley Hilton, by whom she had a son, Donald Hilton, born at Chicago in 1900, and then, by 1905, to John Sähr of Brooklyn. By January 1920 Mary Ada was living in Brooklyn with her widowed daughter and her grandson, three generations in one household; in 1930 she was in her grandson’s household in Queens, aged 79. Her brother Frank Lionel Curtis (1855–1934) died in May 1934, and both of his obituaries named among his survivors “a sister, Mrs. Ada Williams, of Queens Village”. She died in Queens five months later, on 15 October 1934, aged 84, recorded as Ada Curtis Williams.

Notes

Earlier accounts gave her birth as 1846 and her death as 1933. The ages in the census returns of 1865, 1885, 1920 and 1930 and on her death record all point to a birth about 1850 or 1851, and her New York City death record, which names her parents and her husband, settles the year of her death as 1934. The 1880 census gave her age as 39, the same as her husband’s, and the 1930 census described her as married, although she had been a widow for more than forty years. No record of her marriage has been found, and her households in 1900 and 1910 have not been traced.