♀Thirza Day

Thirza Day (born 1802) was a farmer’s wife of Chenango County, New York, who was widowed in 1859 when her husband was killed by a falling tree, and who raised a grandson in her own household until he went to the Civil War at eighteen and died in an army hospital in Virginia. She was the great-great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896), whose son Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922) was the father of Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990), Roger’s father.

Early life

Thirza Day was born in 1802 in Chenango County, New York, the daughter of Thomas G. Day (1772–1849) and Catherine Dey (1773–1850). Both parents were recorded as natives of Vermont: her father’s death is entered on the county’s mortality schedule for the year ending June 1850 as born in Vermont, and her mother, listed as “Caty Dey”, aged 77 and born in Vermont, was living in Thirza’s own household at Smyrna in the summer of 1850.

Marriage and family

In 1822 she married Waterman Curtis (1793–1859), a Massachusetts-born farmer, at Norwich, Chenango County. The couple lived at Norwich until about 1831, when they moved to the neighboring town of Smyrna; the state census of 1855 records both of them as having lived there for twenty-four years. They had eight children, born between 1824 and 1841. The eldest, Thomas Day Curtis, carried his mother’s maiden name as his middle name, a habit that reappears among his own children.

The household she ran at Smyrna in 1855 held her husband, two grown daughters, her younger sons and a nine-year-old grandson, Silas Harvey Chapman, the son of her daughter Jerusha Curtis (1828–1900). Neither of the boy’s parents was living with him, and the records do not explain why he was being brought up by his grandparents. Her son Jeremiah, newly married, lived in the next house; he died in April 1856, aged twenty-three.

Widowhood

On 14 December 1859 Waterman Curtis was killed by a falling tree at Smyrna, and he was buried at Earlville Cemetery, just over the line in Madison County. The census of July 1860 shows Thirza as head of the household at Smyrna, a widow aged 59 with a hundred dollars of personal property, living with her sons Lauren and Junia and her grandson Silas, then fourteen and attending school.

The war took two of the young men of that house. In January 1864 Silas Harvey Chapman and his uncle Lauren Curtis both enlisted in the 1st New York Mounted Rifles, in a group of Chenango County recruits who joined the same company within days of one another. Silas’s service record describes him as a farmer, five feet ten inches tall, with gray eyes and brown hair. After about ten months in the army he fell ill at Point of Rocks, Virginia, during the siege of Petersburg, and died at the base hospital there on 16 November 1864, of what the records call typhoid malarial fever; he was buried at Point of Rocks. Lauren outlived the war, but he died on 14 December 1865, six years to the day after his father, and his gravestone, which names his regiment, stands beside Waterman’s at Earlville.

By June 1865 Thirza had moved across the county line to Hamilton, in Madison County, where the state census found her, aged 65 and widowed, in the household of her youngest son Junia, a farmer. Her daughter Maria, herself by then a widow named Nash with a small son, lived next door. Asked by the enumerator how many children she had borne, Thirza answered eight, which matches the eight children known.

The family tree gives Norwich as the place of her death, but no record of her death or burial, and no date, has been found.

Notes

The censuses spell her given name in several ways, among them Theresa (1850), Thurza and Therza. Her age in those records points to a birth between 1800 and 1802. A family record compiled in 1994 gives her birthplace as Vermont, the home state of both her parents; every census that names a place for her, in 1850, 1855, 1860 and 1865, gives New York, and the state censuses specify Chenango County.