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This family artifact is a 4 1/2” X 7” bound book with maroon fabric covers. It contains thirty-eight unnumbered, unlined pages, twenty-eight of which have handwritten entries by family and friends.
On the flyleaf is written, “Sarah L. Curtis from Sister Burt. Dec. 25, 1889,” indicating the album was a Christmas gift. Sarah Lenora Curtis was then nineteen years old and her sister, Maria Burt Curtis, was twenty-one.
The entries, dated from 1890 to 1898, were made in either Durbin or Buffalo Townships, Cass County, North Dakota. They do not appear in the album chronologically. A few entries are upside down, and one is written entirely in German. There are two entries by Sarah’s younger sister, Marian Matilda (Curtis) Goodsill, one before her 1895 marriage and one after. Names in the album are:
- Eva Beardsley
- Alanson Curtis
- Edson Edgar Curtis
- Elias Baxter Curtis
- Emma Lois Curtis
- Maria Burt Curtis
- Marian Matilda Curtis
- Mary Ellen Frances Curtis
- Melvin Jay Curtis
- E. E. Dill
- Eva M. Dill
- James A. Dodds
- Mrs. A. B. Goodsill
- Annie Grondahl
- James Harding
- A. H. Houd
- Jane Houd
- I. J. Johnson
- Mrs. Sam Liebel Loyal
- George Lyke
- J. H. Lyke
- Mrs. J. H. Lyke
- William Lyons
- Amy Trammell
- Ines R. Walker
- Robert Walker
- Lillie Warner
- Mary E. Zimmerman
It has been interesting and fairly easy to trace the histories of most the people who appear in the album. However, four of the individuals have not been positively identified, and no other trace has been found of a fifth.
Though the entries in the album contain no real personal information, they are a record of each individual’s location at one moment in time. These facsimiles have been compiled to help family historians and genealogists add to the stories of their ancestors.