♀Sarah Curtis

Sarah Curtis (1581 – 1630) was a woman of Laxton, Nottinghamshire, and the wife of Christopher Salmon. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Elizabeth Salmon (1612–1681).

Life at Laxton

Sarah Curtis was born at Laxton in 1581 and died there in 1630, at about forty-nine. The family record gives her husband as Christopher Salmon, said to have been born at Laxton on 30 July 1586 and to have died there in 1625, which would have left her a widow for the last five years of her life. Nothing is known of her parents. Laxton was then, as it remains, an open-field village in north Nottinghamshire, and the family record places both her and her husband there for their whole lives.

The four dates above rest on the family record alone: no register entry, will or deed is known for Sarah Curtis or her husband. The parish register of Laxton, however, survives from the 1560s. It does not support the husband’s birth as the family record gives it: the baptisms for 1586 are nine entries, and none is a Salmon, although a July baptism would fall in the middle of that year’s entries. The register does name a Christopher Salmon at Laxton, with children baptized there between 1602 and 1610, among them a Sara Salmon in 1608, but none of those entries names the children’s mother, and he is very probably an older man than the one the family record describes. The baptisms for 1572 to 1576 are missing from the volume, and a printed transcript of the parish’s marriages, which starts in 1607, holds no Salmon marriage before 1629. After 1620 the register becomes a file of loose yearly returns, so the register cannot show the 1625 death either way.

Notes

Two different sets of parents have been suggested for her in compiled records — a John and Elizabeth Curtis of Northamptonshire, and a William Curtis found in a christening index — but none is confirmed by an original register, so none is treated here as established.

The London and Connecticut puzzle

Their daughter Elizabeth Salmon is recorded as born in 1612 at St Giles Cripplegate in London, and as dying on 13 November 1681 at Wethersfield, Connecticut. A Laxton couple whose child is baptized in London and buried in New England is a story of movement that no surviving document in the family’s possession actually tells, and the London birth in particular is not confirmed by any register. Nor does any document give the wife of Thomas Curtis of Wethersfield the surname Salmon, so the link between this Laxton family and the Wethersfield Curtises rests on the family record alone.

One record was once attached to Sarah Curtis but belongs to another family altogether. It is a burial entry of 31 May 1702 at St Mary at Lambeth, in Surrey, reading “Elizabeth the daughter of Sarah Salmon”. The register volume it comes from begins in 1669, so it cannot concern a woman who died in 1630, and the Elizabeth Salmon of this family had died at Wethersfield twenty-one years before it was written. The entry names only a mother, which is the usual form for the burial of a widow’s child. It is not counted here.