Mary Louise (Davis) Murdock

Mary Louise Davis was the eldest of the three Davis sisters — the children of Homer Edward Davis, the Marietta-area truck driver, and Bessie Marie (Hill) Davis, who would die of lung cancer at 44 in 1950 while her youngest daughter Betty cared for her. Mary was born 17 January 1924, thirteen months before Dorothy Marie (Chuck’s grandmother), and about two years before Betty Jean (Chuck’s great-aunt Wolfe). She is the “one other child of this mother now living” noted on Dorothy’s 24 February 1925 birth certificate — then about a year old. (Some records approximate her birth year as 1923; the 17 January 1924 date is the one this archive carries.)

She appears in the family photographic record from very early. The c. 1929 photograph of the three Davis sisters places her on the left at age five, dressed in a knee-length dress with bobbed hair. The c. 1930 “Why so glum?” portrait names her age six. The c. 1931 sisters-with-puppies snapshot catches her barefoot in the yard. The c. 1935 outdoor group portrait places her in the back row near center at about eleven, with the other two sisters scattered through the same labeled cast. Together these five childhood pictures — Mary, Dorothy, and Betty over six years — are the earliest visual record of the maternal-side Davis household this archive holds.

The Unionville house fire

Mary was a small child when the Davis family home in Unionville, Ohio caught fire and burned to the ground while her parents were away — the story her brother-in-law Robert Earl Wildermuth preserved in the 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage. The three sisters moved into a small undamaged shed while their parents lived in a poorly insulated one-room garage through the cold winter that followed. Mary was the oldest of the three Davis girls through that recovery — eight or nine at the time of the fire by Robert Earl’s dating — and would have been the one looking out for the younger two.

She and Dorothy started school together at the Unionville Grade School in southern Washington County before both later transferred to Marietta High School.

Marriage to a Murdock

Mary’s married surname surfaces in print only at the end of her sisters’ obituaries. Dorothy’s 2010 obituary spells the name Murdoch. Betty’s 2015 obituary spells the same name Murdock. Newspaper transcription accounts for most of the discrepancy — both spellings appear in 20th-century American records as variants of the same Scottish-derived surname.

Mary’s husband’s first name and the date and location of the marriage are not in this archive. He is not the Cpl. Jesse Murdoch from Tyler, Texas who was tail gunner on Robert Earl’s B-24 crew — that is a separate Murdoch, in the maternal-line crew record, presumably unrelated.

Death before 2010

Mary predeceased both of her younger sisters. She is named in Dorothy’s 2010 obituary as the one sister “preceded in death”, and in Betty’s 2015 obituary again the same way. The exact date and place are not in this archive. The Davis-side records were transmitted forward primarily through the surviving sisters — Dorothy in Atlanta, Betty in St. Petersburg — so Mary’s later-life record sits in whatever files her children kept.

If she had children, they would be Chuck’s first cousins once removed on the Davis side. They are not surfaced in this archive yet.

Sources: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage Davis section; Dorothy ‘Dot’ Marie (Davis) Wildermuth obituary, Marietta Times, 13–14 March 2010; Betty Jean (Davis) Wolfe obituary, 2015; Davis sisters c. 1929 portrait and three following sister-portrait artifacts.