Joseph Davis

Joseph Davis is the earliest documented ancestor on the Davis line — Chuck’s maternal three-times-great-grandfather, and the generation just above William Armstrong Davis.

He was born in 1819 in Jefferson County, Ohio, along the upper Ohio River, and on 26 May 1842, in Jefferson County, he married Jane Armstrong (1816–1881). Their son William Armstrong Davis (b. 5 November 1859) carried Jane’s maiden surname as his middle name and continued the line that runs through Homer Edward Davis and Dorothy Marie Davis Wildermuth down to Chuck. William Armstrong was one of seven children the GEDCOM records for Joseph and Jane — alongside Joseph Warren, Leah, Elizabeth J., Baxter, John Wiley, and Albert L. Davis.

The family’s center of gravity shifted downriver to Washington County, where Joseph died in 1896 and was buried at Beverly — the Muskingum-River town just above Marietta, the same southeastern-Ohio ground where the Davis, Way, and Wildermuth lines all converge in this archive.

What’s open

• Joseph’s parents are now placed: William Davis (1764–1851) and Elizabeth (b. ca. 1781), from the family’s FamilySearch pedigree — pushing the Davis line back to a man born a decade before the Revolution. Their own origins (birthplaces, Elizabeth’s maiden name, and where the family lived before Joseph’s 1819 Ohio birth) remain the open end of the line.

Source: Eesley/Wildermuth GEDCOM tree — FamilySearch ID GMTB-SJX (birth 1819 Jefferson County, Ohio; marriage 26 May 1842; death 1896, burial at Beverly, Washington County, Ohio).