Dorothy Marie Davis — Ohio Department of Health Birth Certificate, 24 February 1925

The Ohio Department of Health Certificate of Live Birth for Dorothy Marie Davis — Chuck’s maternal grandmother — registered out of Columbus, filed 10 May 1925 by H. S. Dickson at the Waterford Township registrar’s office. It is the founding identity document for the Davis-side of the Wildermuth household and the first document of the Davis section of Robert Earl’s 1990 Heritage.

What the form records

• Full name: Dorothy Marie Davis. Sex: Female. Date of birth: Feb. 24, 1925. Place of birth: Waterford Twp., Waterford, Ohio, Washington County.
• Hour of birth: 11:15 AM. Number of months of pregnancy: 9.
• Father: Homer E. Davis, age 25, white, born in Ohio, truck driver of Waterford. Mother: Bessie M. Hill, age 19, white, born in Ohio, housewife of Waterford.
• “Children born to this mother not including this child: 1” — the older sister Mary Louise, age ~13 months at the time. (“How many of these are now living: 1; born alive but now dead: 0; born dead: 0.”)
• Mother’s mailing address: Waterford, Ohio.
• The attending registrar’s signature on the lower margin: H. S. Dickson, Waterford, Ohio, dated 5-10-25.

The certificate is the only documentary instance in this side of the archive of Bessie Hill’s maiden name being recorded against an Ohio state form. Two generations later, that documentation gap on the Hill side would become one of Robert Earl’s open research questions in the 1990 Heritage’s closing pages.

Why it sits in this archive

Two things follow from the certificate that the rest of Dottie’s page builds on:

1. Waterford, Washington County, Ohio is fixed as the birth place — not Marietta, the town the family is now most associated with. The Davis family came into the Wildermuth household by way of the smaller Washington County town a few miles up the Muskingum.
2. The contrast with Sadye Fleming — Robert Earl’s mother, born twenty-four years earlier in Waverly, West Virginia — is sharp. Sadye had no birth certificate; Robert Earl writes in the 1990 Heritage that rural West Virginia in 1900 lacked the road infrastructure for births to be officially recorded. Dottie’s 1925 Ohio certificate, by contrast, is filed within ten weeks of her birth by a named registrar. The state-administrative gap between the two grandmothers’ birth records is itself one of the archive’s small documents about how government reach had changed in a quarter-century of American rural life.

Source: The Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage by Robert Earl Wildermuth, 1990 — Davis section, Document #1.