McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
Curtis Family Collection
Collection
9.3 cm of textual records.
Enoch Curtis was a tanner, currier, and small landowner from Clarenceville, Quebec (St-George-de-Clarenceville, Missisquoi). The town was founded by Loyalists fleeing the American Revolutionary War, including Isaac Salls of Long Island and three laborers, Amasa Curtis, David Wilcox, and Stephen Wilcox. Amasa Curtis (1767-1837) and his wife Hannah (1765-1831) had eight children, among them Enoch Curtis's father, William Moses (b. 1795), a farmer. Enoch Curtis married Lucretia Colton (1803-1883) in Clarenceville on 14 October 1827. The couple had four children: Edmund Henry (1829-1852 , married Maria Salls), Matilda Jane (1831-1899 , married George Nelson Clark), Marshall Tyler (1836-1843), and Myron Vertunon (b. 1843, married Louisa Conant). He worked as a tanner and currier in Rouville country, residing at Colwell Manor (Saint Armand Methodist Church of Canada index of baptisms, marriages, and burials [1837-1970]). By 1843, he is described as a yeoman and resided in Foucault county.
Collection consists of six account books dating from the 1830s to the 1860s, including ledgers and daybooks, used and kept primarily by Enoch Curtis for his leather tanning business. There are also some loose accounts and notes on small sheets of paper. The ledgers use a single-entry bookkeeping method in £sd. They are organized by individual merchant account, with records of debits (purchases or expenditures made) and credits (payments or goods received). Parallel underlining and Xs indicate when an account has balanced. The collection also includes some records related to Stella Curtis from the 1890s, including one letter and two sheets of math problems marked Clarenceville Model School.
Purchased for Rare Books and Special Collections from Warren Baker, Montreal, in September, 2017.