♀Salena Sherman

Salena Sherman (24 March 1806 – 15 March 1842) was a New York woman, born at Cambridge in Washington County, who moved as a girl with her parents to New Berlin in Chenango County, was left a widow at twenty-five with two small daughters, and was appointed by the county’s Surrogate’s Court as guardian of their inheritances. She was the great-great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Annis Wheaton (1827–1883), Annis’s son Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922) and his son Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990).

Early life

Salena Sherman was born on 24 March 1806 at Cambridge, Washington County, New York, a daughter of Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828) and Waite Allen (1766–1850). A Sherman family card file compiled in 1913, which spells her name “Salenia”, lists her as the fourteenth of sixteen children born to the couple between 1783 and 1811. The family was still at Cambridge in 1810, when the census recorded Batchelder Sherman’s household a few doors from that of his widowed mother, Ruth Sherman. By 1818 he was on a land assessment in Chenango County, and he was “of New Berlin” there when he made his will on 2 January 1828.

Marriage and widowhood

By the time of that will Salena had married Samuel Wheaton (1797–1831). Her father died on 26 February 1828, and his will, proved on 15 October 1828, left the remainder of his personal estate to be shared equally among “my four doughters Laura Tuttle Prudence Sherman Salin Wheaton and Waity Sherman” after “the decease of my beloved wife Waity Sherman”. The same will shows that two of those daughters were still single; Salena and her sister Laura, whom the 1913 card file calls Luna, were already married.

The couple had two daughters, Annis, born on 27 October 1827 at Norwich, and Elenor F., born about 1829. Samuel Wheaton died “a natural death” at New Berlin on 17 October 1831, without a will. On 23 January 1832 Salena, recorded as “Celena Wheaton”, applied as his widow to the Surrogate’s Court at Oxford, stating that the personal estate did not exceed four hundred dollars and that he had left two children. Letters of administration were granted to her on 27 January 1832, and at the end of that month the surrogate, John Tracy, named her guardian of both girls, “minors under the age of fourteen years”, whose shares of their father’s estate were each valued at under one hundred dollars. The order ran only “until they respectively shall arrive to the age of fourteen years and until another Guardian be appointed for them”.

Salena Wheaton died at New Berlin on 15 March 1842, aged thirty-five, some months after Annis had turned fourteen. Her mother survived her by eight years. Annis later married Thomas Day Curtis; the family record names one of their daughters Salenia, born about 1858, and a son born in 1865, Orcus Allen Curtis, carried as his middle name the maiden surname of Annis’s grandmother, Waite Allen. Elenor never married and died at Preston, Chenango County, in 1907.

Notes

The court papers spell her name two ways within one proceeding, “Celena” on the application and “Alena” on the letters of administration, and never “Salena”. Her father’s will writes “Salin”, added above the line. Her maiden name is not stated in the probate papers; it rests on her father’s will, which names her as his married daughter Wheaton. It is consistent with, though not proved by, her grandson Orcus’s 1920 marriage record at Los Angeles, which gives his mother as “Annis Wheaton Sherman”.

An earlier version of the family record gave her birth as 24 March 1808 in Chenango County. The family was still at Cambridge in 1810 and is not found in Chenango County until 1818, and the 1806 Cambridge birth is the one that matches both the family’s residence and the 1913 card file. The birth date rests on that card file, a compilation, and the source of the death date has not been traced. No record made at her birth or her death has been found.