Not surprisingly, a “Cause of Death” entry here is bound to be kind of gloomy. This one is both gloomy and confusing. I created a report in my RootsMagic database to help me analyze all the various causes of death in the family tree and decided to highlight William S. Davis and his daughter Harriet, my first cousin 6 times removed and my second cousin five times removed, respectively.
William was the son of Nathan and Jane (Sutton) Davis and the grandson of my 6G-grandparents, Nathan and Ann (Gifford) Davis. He was born 15 December 1805 and in 1827 he married Sophia Chaney, his third cousin, in Tyler County, (later West) Virginia.1
Their first child was Harriet, born on 14 October 1828. Daughter Jane was born 30 September 1830, and Helen Mary was born in 1833. Primary evidence is scant, so I’ll report what I have learned with the caveat that it may not be a completely accurate account. The Find a Grave website describes the fate of William and Harriet, noting that both died of injuries sustained in a tornado in 1837. Harriet has a headstone in the Old Seventh Day Baptist Cemetery in West Union, West Virginia, where her date of death is noted as 1 June 1837. No headstone for William has been found.
Find a Grave, as well as the Doddridge County Heritage Guild website, reference an account of the tornado as found in Hardesty’s 1883 History of Doddridge County. This work describes the tornado as the most destructive storm in that area but indicates it occurred on 3 June 1833, not 1 June 1837. It notes that it destroyed the log Seventh Day Baptist Church building as well as the home of a Joseph Davis when his home was also destroyed. It does not mention a William Davis or the death of a daughter Harriet.
So you can see why I am confused. Whatever happened to William, by October 1840 Sophia had remarried, to a Joseph Garlow. They had a daughter, Alice Lee, and sons, John C. and Thomas, and they eventually moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Sophia died in 1886 and Joseph in 1892, and they are buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Cedar Rapids. No cause of death is listed for either of them.2
