♂Orcus Allen Curtis

Orcus Allen Curtis (born 27 August 1865) was an American who lived in Buffalo, New York, and later in Chicago, and who married his second wife, Esther Carlson, twice: at Manhattan Beach, California, in 1920 and again at Chicago in 1923. In his sixties and seventies he raised a granddaughter in his own household. He was a son of Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896) and Annis Wheaton (1827–1883), and an elder brother of Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922), grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

He was born on 27 August 1865 in New York. The state census taken that June had found the family at Smyrna, Chenango County, without him, recording that his mother had already borne ten children, and the state census of 1875 gives his birthplace as Chenango. His middle name, Allen, was the maiden surname of his mother’s grandmother, Waite Allen. He grew up as the family followed his father’s work as a printer and newspaper editor: the census of 1870 found him, aged four, at Utica; the state census of 1875 at Syracuse, aged nine; and the census of 1880 back at Utica, aged fourteen and at school. His mother died at Syracuse in 1883.

Buffalo

By about 1894 he had married Anna M. Fagan, who had been born in Canada about 1869; a compiled family tree gives the wedding as 14 October 1894 at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Buffalo, a date that comes from that compilation alone. Their son, Lionel Allen Curtis (1895–1962), was born at Buffalo on 26 June 1895, and carried his father’s middle name and the middle name of his uncle Frank Lionel Curtis. When his own father died in 1896, the obituary in the Rome Daily Sentinel said that Orcus “is in Canada”. In June 1900 the family lived in Buffalo’s 20th Ward, where the census recorded the couple as married six years, and the state census of 1905 found the three of them in the 21st Ward, the name written “Curtiss”. What became of Anna after 1905 is not known.

Second marriage

By 1920 he was living in Chicago, where his brothers Arthur and Hubert worked as printers and where his unmarried sister Bertha E. Curtis, a child nurse, had died in November 1917. On 2 August 1920, at the age of 54, he married Esther Carlson, born in Sweden about 1880, the daughter of Carl Carlson and Clara Matilda Olson. The wedding took place at the Alhambra Hotel at Manhattan Beach, California, the town where his son had been living that January with his young wife and their infant twin daughters. A Buffalo newspaper carried the announcement three weeks later, sent in by the bride’s sister, Mrs. S. J. Carter of East Wilson, New York, and described the groom as “Mr. O. A. Curtis, of Chicago, Ill.” The Los Angeles marriage record gives his parents as “Thos Day Curtis” and “Annis Wheaton Sherman”, the only record found that attaches her mother’s surname, Sherman, to his mother.

On 29 October 1923 the same couple married again, at Chicago, where the Cook County record gives his age as 58 and hers as 43. The records do not explain the second ceremony, and no record of a divorce between the two dates has been found. No children of the marriage are recorded.

Later life

One of his son’s twin daughters died at Nogales, Arizona, in 1920, and the surviving twin grew up with her grandfather; the records do not say how she came to live with him. The census of 1930 found Orcus, then 64, at the head of a household in Chicago with Esther and his granddaughter, aged ten. By 1935 the household had moved to rural Cayuga County, New York, and in April 1940 the census found the three of them in the fourth ward of the city of Cortland, Orcus aged 74, Esther 62 and his granddaughter 20. That census is the last record of him found. No record of his death or burial has been found, and no memorial to him is known.

Notes

The census takers wrote his given name several ways. The 1870 census has “Owens A”, the state census of 1875 “August A.”, and the 1880 census “Orcus A.”; every age in the records from 1875 to 1940 fits a birth in August 1865. The 1875 entry, “August A. Curtis”, is the same boy and not a separate brother: each census has only one boy of his age in the household.