John Curtis Smith and Mary Snell Steele Smith were Congregational missionaries from New England who served at posts in Ceylon, then part of the India Mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, in the mid-nineteenth century. Mary Snell (21 September 1814--14 May 1873) was born in Plainfield, Massachusetts. A teacher, she embarked for India in November, 1836 with her husband, Dr. John Steele, a physician-missionary. John Curtis Smith (24 September 1812-21 March 1884) was born and raised in Williamstown, Vermont and was a graduate of Middlebury College (1838) and Andover Seminary (1841). After graduation, he married in1841 and embarked for Ceylon on 14 October 1841 with his wife, who was a teacher, Eunice Taft Morse Smith (15 April 1815-9 May 1842). Soon after they arrived in India, Eunice Morse Smith died of consumption. Dr. John Steele died in October 1842, after an illness.
John Curtis Smith and Mary Snell Steele were married in Ceylon on 13 October 1843. In the years following their marriage, Mary Snell Smith gave birth to six children, all were born in Ceylon: Thomas Snell Smith (24 January 1845-16 December 1900); Eunice Morse Smith (11 February 1846-August 1872), named for Smith's first wife; Laura Parkhurst Smith (31 December 1847--3 June 1872), William Halleck Smith (10 August 1850--24 July 1924), Henry Hill Smith (6 December 1851-19 January 1934) and Mary Elizabeth Smith (28 March 1853-December, 1929). Eight-year-old Thomas Snell Smith and his sister, seven-year-old Eunice Morse Smith sailed from Madras, India in December 1853 in the company of a missionary couple, Susan Tolman Mills and Cyrus T. Mills. After spending several weeks in Cape Town, South Africa, the two children, with their escorts, arrived at Boston in mid-May 1854; arrangements had been made for them to live with relatives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
After sojourns in Ceylon of fourteen and twenty years respectively, John Curtis Smith and Mary Snell Steele Smith journeyed to the United States via London, leaving Ceylon in late 1856 and arriving in Boston in May, 1857, with their four younger children-Laura, William, Henry, and Mary. After John and Mary Smith traveled around New England to visit their two older children, and then to see relatives, both in New England and in Illinois and Minnesota, the family seems to have united briefly in Central Village (MA or CT), while arrangements were made to leave Laura, William, Henry, and their oldest children Thomas and Eunice behind in the United States. John Curtis Smith and Mary Snell Smith, with their youngest child, Mary, returned to Ceylon in 1860. Mary was sent to the United States in 1865, while her parents remained in Ceylon.
For more detailed biographical accounts of the Smith parents and children, especially during the time period covered in this collection (1850s and 1860s), see biographical sketches written by Elizabeth C. Stevens in Series IV, Box 7.
From the guide to the John Curtis and Mary Snell Smith Papers, 1837-1873, 1853-1869, (Yale Divinity School Library)
