♂William Wheaton Curtis

William Wheaton Curtis (8 February 1897 – 24 October 1983) was a Chicago-born man who left the city as a young man and was living in Houston, Texas, by December 1918, at twenty-one; he spent the remaining sixty-five years of his life there. He was married twice. He was a son of Arthur Lee Curtis (1867–1955), a grandson of Thomas Day Curtis (1824–1896) and Annis Wheaton (1827–1883), and a nephew of Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922), grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

He was born in Chicago on 8 February 1897, the eldest of the three children of Arthur Lee Curtis, a typesetter from West Edmeston, New York, and Helen Johanna Elias, who had married in Chicago in November 1895. His middle name was his grandmother’s maiden name. The census of 1900 found him, aged three, in his parents’ household in the 21st Ward of Chicago. A brother, Hubert, was born in 1898 and a sister, Helen Margaret, in 1901.

When he registered for the First World War draft on 5 June 1918 he was twenty-one, living with his father at 7041 Calumet Avenue, Chicago, and working for Armour & Co. at the Union Stock Yards. The registrar described him as of medium height and build, with blue eyes and dark brown hair.

Houston

Within six months he was in Texas. The Veterans Administration’s master index records military service for him with a date of 14 December 1918 and a residence of Houston, the earliest record placing him there. By the census of January 1920 he was a married man and head of his own household in Harris County, with his wife enumerated as Mamie T. Curtis. Her maiden name, Crosby, is known from the Social Security record of their son, Arthur Lee Curtis, who was born in Houston on 24 September 1924 and named after his paternal grandfather. The marriage did not last: the census of 1930 lists William, aged thirty-three, in Houston as divorced. No record of the marriage itself or of the divorce has been found. Arthur Lee Curtis lived out his life in Houston, where he died on 25 March 2005.

On 9 March 1935, in Fort Bend County, Texas, according to a transcribed county marriage index, he married Blanche Irene Durrenberger, a native of San Marcos, Texas, fifteen years his junior. The census of 1940 found the couple in Houston with their first daughter, at the same address they had occupied in 1935. They had three children, two daughters and a son, William Wheaton Curtis Jr. (1944–2016), who became an electrical engineer.

In 1942 he registered for the Second World War draft at Houston. In June of the same year, at forty-five, he obtained a delayed birth certificate from Cook County, Illinois, which names both of his parents in full. Many Americans who had no birth certificate obtained one in those years to prove their age and citizenship; his own record does not say why he applied. When his father died in February 1955, the Chicago Tribune’s death notice named him as “William W. Curtis of Houston, Tex.”

Death

He died in Houston on 24 October 1983, aged eighty-six. His remains are in the Garden of the Urns, a columbarium section of Brookside Memorial Park, Houston, in the same plot where Blanche was placed after her death in 2004.

Notes

A New York army service card for a William W. Curtis of Cohoes, New York, who enlisted at Fort Slocum in May 1918, belongs to a different man. It gives his birthplace as Glens Falls, New York, and an age that points to a birth about June 1897, while William was recorded in 1900, aged three and living with his parents, as born in Illinois in February 1897, and was still registering for the draft in Chicago in June 1918.