Bessie Marie (Hill) Davis

Bessie Marie Hill was the daughter of Harvey Hendershot Hill (1882-1951) and Clara Victoria Ullmann (1885-1941), born 28 March 1905 in Ohio. She was nineteen years old when she gave birth to her second daughter Dorothy Marie Davis at 11:15 AM on 24 February 1925 in Waterford Township, Washington County, Ohio — the birth attended by H. B. Yarna and registered by H. S. Dickson the following 10 May. The birth certificate records her usual mailing address as Waterford, Ohio, occupation housewife, race white, with one other child already living (Mary, age ~2).

Her full first name “Bessie Marie” appears in Dorothy’s funeral program, which named Dorothy’s parents as “Bessie Marie Davis and Homer Edward Davis.” The middle-name “Marie” appears to be where Dorothy’s own middle name was inherited from.

She married Homer Edward Davis at some date before 1923. Their three daughters in birth order:

• Mary Davis (b. ~1923) — “one other child of this mother now living” per Dorothy’s 1925 birth certificate.
• Dorothy Marie Davis (b. 24 February 1925).
• Betty Davis (b. ~1926).

The three sisters together are captured in two of the photographs in Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage, at ages 5/4/3 and 6/5/4.

The Unionville fire

The Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage records that the Davis family later moved from Waterford to Unionville, Ohio, where their house burned down while Homer and Bessie were away. They lost everything and moved into a one-room garage for the cold winter that followed; the three daughters were given a small shed that had escaped the fire. The disaster was a defining piece of Dorothy’s childhood and is implied to have been the family’s principal hardship of the 1930s.

Death at 45 — and the Hill-Ullmann parents

Bessie died 29 May 1950, age 45 — sixteen years before her granddaughter Terrie Lee’s birth, and twenty-nine years before her great-grandson Chuck’s birth. Neither would meet her. Her parents both predeceased her by less than a decade: her mother Clara died in October 1941, her father Harvey followed in February 1951 (eight months after Bessie). The Hill-Ullmann generation of the Davis family is, in retrospect, the southeastern Ohio working-family generation that did not see its grandchildren into adulthood.

The Hill family connection on Janetta Smith’s side carries through her grandsons — including Josiah Way Hill, Bessie’s uncle who was killed in action at the Meuse-Argonne on 11 October 1918 when Bessie was thirteen years old — the family’s earliest documented World War casualty.

In the photographs

The portrait at the top of this page — a young woman in a white blouse seated on a porch step, c. early 1920s — is the first standalone photograph of Bessie in this archive; she is about seventeen or eighteen here. She also appears among the family at the c. 1938–41 Hill family porch at Mt. Perry, and, near the end of her life, standing behind her daughter and infant grandson in the 1947 five-generation portrait — she would die three years later, at 45.

Sources: Dorothy Marie Davis’s birth certificate, 24 February 1925, in the Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage; Dorothy Marie Wildermuth funeral program, 13 August 2010; Eesley/Wildermuth GEDCOM tree (June 2026 trace) — FamilySearch tree ID LRDD-J4B for Bessie Marie Hill confirms birth 28 Mar 1905, death 29 May 1950, parents Harvey Hendershot Hill + Clara Victoria Ullmann.