I was fiddling with memoir's titlingpage and wanted functionality for the \thanks macro. This is normally handled by \maketitle, but we're bypassing this construction. Section 4.2 of the (otherwise excellent) memoir manual doesn't state anything on how to actually implement this behaviour yourself.

After a bit of fiddling with memoir.dtx (any .dtx file is the documented source of a LaTeX package or class) I hacked together the desired result. A bit of \makeatletter magic and calling the correct macros did what I wanted.

For future reference, here it is.

If you want to change the marker using \thanksmarkseries{...}, start your titlingpage environment with the following: 

\thanksmarkseries{alph}
\makeatletter
\@bsmarkseries
\makeatother

The main part of the solution simply is to mention 

\makeatletter
\usethanksrule
\@thanks
\makeatother
at the end of the titlingpage environment. Note that \usethanksrule is not necessary but it feels better to have it.

There is the undocumented \saythanks macro though, but it is buggy: it always uses fnsymbol as its marker for the actual footnote. Behaviour that could be fixed I presume.