Jeremiah Curtin Collection
Jeremiah Curtin was one of the most noted intellectual figures to come out of Milwaukee County’s pioneer period. Although Jeremiah was born in Detroit, Michigan on September 6, 1835, his father, David, moved the family to southern Greenfield Township when Jeremiah was around two years old. He spent his boyhood years on his father’s farm, and after schooling in Milwaukee and at Carroll College, in Waukesha, Curtin left for Harvard College at the age of twenty-four. Upon graduation in 1863, Curtin took a job for a few years as a member of the United States diplomatic service and was stationed in Russia. Jeremiah went on to more adventures after his marriage to Alma Cardell in 1872. She travelled the world with him acting as an assistant to his study of the folklore of primitive peoples. It is reported that Jeremiah mastered over 70 languages and dialects which enabled him to record the stories, languages, and customs of many of the world’s ethnic groups.
Curtin was probably best known to the American public for his translation of the Polish writer, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s work, Quo Vadis in 1896. The success of this publication and its income gave him time to work on his own research for the rest of his life. But Jeremiah’s knowledge of languages and cultures served him once more shortly before his death. In 1905, he was asked by President Theodore Roosevelt to serve at the peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after the Russo-Japanese War ended. He died in Bristol, Vermont on December 14, 1906.
Curtin’s diaries and photographs highlight the years that he and Alma spent living and working among the people of the world. Jeremiah collected a rich store of myths and folklores from his ancestral Ireland, Indian tribes of the American West, primitive tribes in Asia, and ethnic groups in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central America. It is no exaggeration to say that without Jeremiah Curtin many of the stories and histories of ancient peoples would have been lost for future generations.
This collection was adopted by the Irish Genealogical Society of Wisconsin.
