♀Mary Morton

Mary Morton (28 October 1768 – 9 January 1816) was a woman of Chesterfield, Massachusetts, who moved with her husband’s family and her own from Hampshire County to Norwich, Chenango County, New York, in the years after 1800. Through her mother she descended from William Brewster, the Mayflower passenger and elder of the Plymouth church. She was the third great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Waterman Curtis (1793–1859).

Early life

Mary Morton was born at Plympton, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, on 28 October 1768, the daughter of James Morton (1739–1810) and Mary Holmes (born 1745). The Plympton town clerk entered her birth in his own hand under “The Children of James Morton by Mary his wife”, after that of her elder brother Josiah, born on 10 May 1767. They are the only two Morton children in the Plympton book, and the printed Plympton records likewise enter both as children of James and Mary.

The family moved to Chesterfield, in the hills of Hampshire County, before October 1774, when her sister Mehitabel was born there. In May 1783, when Mary was fourteen, an index to Massachusetts christenings records her christening at Chesterfield, naming her father as James Morton. Her sister Abigail’s christening is indexed in the same month, so the two were probably baptized together; the church record itself has not been seen. Chesterfield’s own records pick up the remaining children, the youngest of whom, born in 1790, was christened at Chesterfield on 11 August of that year and named Jonathan Holmes Morton after his mother’s family.

A history of Chesterfield families records that her father served the town as sealer of leather in 1783, the town officer who inspected leather offered for sale and stamped it as sound.

Her mother’s father was Jonathan Holmes of Kingston (1709–1787), whose will left a legacy to “my Daughter Mary Morton”. His mother, Mary Brewster, was a great-granddaughter of William Brewster, making Mary Morton his fourth great-granddaughter. Her mother’s mother was Mary Waterman (1716–1749/50), of a Plympton family, and that surname would reappear as the given name of Mary Morton’s son.

Marriage and family

The intention of marriage between Mary Morton and Jeremiah Curtis of Worthington was entered at Chesterfield on 31 May 1790, and they married there a week later, on 7 June 1790. Their first child, John, died on 25 February 1792 at eleven days old. Waterman followed in March 1793 and Junia in February 1795, both born at Chesterfield. The census of 1800 finds the family at Blandford, in the same county, with two daughters under ten as well as the two boys. No birth, baptism or later record of those girls has been found, and they are not otherwise named.

Norwich

Between 1800 and 1804 the family moved to North Norwich, in Chenango County, New York. The Chesterfield history states that all of Jeremiah’s brothers and sisters made the same move, and it records that Mary’s parents were given a church letter to Norwich on 11 January 1801, so the Mortons and the Curtises, already joined by the 1790 marriage, resettled in the same place within a few years of each other. Her son Truman was born at North Norwich in 1804. Junia died in September 1809, aged fourteen, and was buried at Earlville, where his stone names him the son of “Mr Jeremiah & Mrs Mary Curtis”. Her last child, Electa, was born in New York in December 1811; when Electa died in Michigan in 1888, her death return named her parents as Jeremiah and Mary Curtiss.

Jeremiah is last recorded in Chenango County in 1810, and whether he was living when Mary died is not known. Mary died on 9 January 1816, aged forty-seven, at Norwich. An online memorial places her grave in North Norwich Cemetery, “wife of Jeremiah Curtis”; the stone survives but is too weathered to read in the photograph taken of it.

Notes

Some versions of the family record have called her Mary Irena Morton. Every record of her own life, from the Plympton birth entry to the Chesterfield marriage record, calls her simply Mary. The only document found with the name “Mary Irena” is a guardianship recorded in Rensselaer County, New York, on 25 December 1816, for Mary Irena Curtis, a nine-year-old daughter of Moses S. Curtis of Salem, a different person. That guardianship has also been attached to her in an online tree as though it were her probate, although she had died in Chenango County eleven months earlier.

A family chart compiled in 1994 gave her birth as 29 October 1767 at Chesterfield, and the online memorial gives 1773. The Plympton town record, the Chesterfield records and the Chesterfield history all agree on 28 October 1768 at Plympton. Electa’s death return gives Connecticut as her mother’s birthplace, a second-hand statement by a daughter who was four when her mother died; it is true of Jeremiah but not of Mary.