Dr. Thomas Curtis

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Dr. Thomas Curtis (1619–1681), a 10× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his English birth, transatlantic settlement in colonial Connecticut, his death in Stratford, and his daughter Hannah Anna Curtis. Notable: early colonial New England physician with roots in Nazing, Essex, England.

Dr. Thomas Curtis was born on the 12th of March, 1619, in the parish of Nazing, in Essex, England. Nazing in the early seventeenth century was a small Essex village whose inhabitants, in the decades surrounding his birth, were notable contributors to the great Puritan migration to New England; a number of Nazing families crossed the Atlantic in the 1630s and 1640s to settle the early towns of the Connecticut and Massachusetts colonies. It was within this broader current of dissenting English families relocating to the New World that Thomas Curtis's life unfolded.

By the time of his death, Thomas had established himself in Stratford, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, one of the earliest English plantations along the Long Island Sound, founded in 1639. Stratford in the middle and later seventeenth century was a modest agricultural and trading community of Puritan congregational character, and the title of Doctor borne by Thomas indicates his standing as a man of learning and useful skill in a settlement where physicians were few and much depended upon. He died there on the 13th of November, 1681, at the age of sixty-two, having spanned in his lifetime the reigns of four English monarchs and the consolidation of the New England colonies.

Among his children was Hannah Anna Curtis, born in 1665 and surviving until 1737, through whom the line descends to the compiler. Hannah's long life, extending well into the eighteenth century, carried forward into the next generation the family's establishment in colonial Connecticut.

Dr. Thomas Curtis stands at a considerable remove in the family record, situated ten generations before the compiler, yet his transit from the Essex countryside to the shores of Connecticut marks one of the earliest and most consequential migrations preserved in the archive. He was the compiler's 10× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.