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The Davis Genealogy




John Davies was born in 1782 in Merthyr Tydfil, Georgetown, Wales and he died 20 June 1833.  Little is known about John Davies (Davids), except that he was a collier (mineworker).   He married Anna Evans and they had five known children, all in Merthyr Tydfil:  John David (21 April 1806),  Mary Evans (26 April 1808),  David (24 February 1817), and William Edward (23 June 1820).

Generation No. 2

William Edward Davies, son of John, was born 23 June 1820 in Merthyr Tydfil, Georgetown, Wales, and died 11 March 1874 in the US..  He married Mary Evans, daughter of John Evans. John Evans and his family were the proprietors of the establishment, The Collier's Arms.   William, like his father, was a collier.  The youngest son, he was only 13 when his father died, at which point his schooling ended and he went into the mines.  Despite the early end of his formal education, he had learned to write in both English and Welsh,  apparent by the log he kept in both languages of the voyage to the United States in 1857.  William sailed from Liverpool April 13, 1857, on the sailing ship Emma Jane and he arrived in Philadelphia on May 30, a journey of almost six weeks.  After a short stay in Minersville, PA, William and his family moved to a home in Merthyr Vach,  Mineral Ridge, Trumbull County, Ohio which was a center of coal and iron mining in the early nineteenth century.  How long William worked the mines in Mineral Ridge is not clear, but he later left the area and moved to a farm in Elkton, Columbiana County, which also had a coal mine, providing a source of cash income.  William was drafted for service in the Civil War 28 September 1864, however the burden of raising ten children was difficult, so he paid, in accordance with the legally permitted practice of the day, for a substitute.  The eleven children of William and Mary are:   Anne (1849),  John W. (1851),  David S (1853),  Mary (1854),  Jane (1856),  William E (1859),  Benjamin (1860),  Henry (1862),  Gabriel C (1864),  Edward (1866), and Henry (1870).


Generation No. 3


Anna Davies, daughter of William, was born September 19 1849 in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales and she died 28 July 1929.  She married Richard D Jones in 1894, however the couple had no children.  Anna came to America at the age of eight;  like her father and mother, she was bilingual in Welsh and English, but her schooling in Mineral Ridge fixed English as her basic language.  She assumed responsibility, with her mother, of the younger children when her father died when Anna was twenty-four.  Anna returned to Girard, Ohio after the death of her husband in 1898.  There she established a millenary shop on Liberty Street and she later took over the raising of her deceased sister Jane's son, William Edward Thomas.  Her last days were lived out in the Masonic retirement home in Springfield, Ohio, where she died. 

John W Davies, son of William Edward, was born 15 January 1851 in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales and he died 14 October 1925 in San Jose, California.  He married Anna Davis 25 may 1881, the daughter of John Davis and Ann Edwards.  Little seems to be known of John... He worked as a blacksmith shop after he finished his apprenticeship as a machinist in Alliance, Ohio.  After finding no work as a machinist, he worked in the coal mines in Pennsylvania.  Some time in the late 1870's, he went west with his two younger brothers, David and William.  After working in a coal mine near Topeka, Kansas, he went further west, to Colorado, working in a coal mine near Cole Creek.  Ten years later, he was homesteading near Billington, Washington, where his wife and children lived on the homestead while he worked in Seattle, walking back and forth to bring supplies to them.  After the homestead claim was established in Bellingham, Oregon, he sold either the timber or the timber with the land and moved south, first to Salem, Oregon, and then to San Jose (1895), San Leandro (1896), Salinas (1897), Corning (1898), Ashland (1900), Dunsmuir (1908), Poso Robles (1917), and San Jose (1921).  Much of the time, John found employment as the "engineer" of a coal mine.  In retirement, he was a railroad watchman.  John and Anna had six children:  William Franklin (1882),  John Irving (1883),  Clara Marie (1885),  Henry Richard (1887),  Walter Stanley (1889),  and Annie Bertha (1890)


David S Davies
, son of William Edward, was born 28 January 1853 in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales and he died in 1905.  David was the third oldest son, and one of the five children left with their mother by their father when he came to the United States in 1857, and brought the following year by their mother Mariah to join their father in Mineral Ridge, Ohio.  A few years after his father's death in 1874, David went to Colorado, after a brief stay in Kansas with his two brothers.  Working (in a coal mine) in Oak Creek, Colorado (a mining center in northern Colorado) he met and married Rosabell Beal from East St Louis, Illinois.  In 1887 David and his wife and children moved to Long Valley, Idaho where they homesteaded near Donnely, Idaho.  There, in near isolation, Rosabell continued to bear children every two years, making nine in all.  Her nearest neighbor was an Indian squaw, who assisted her at childbirth, including the time when she died while giving birth to her youngest son, Rosco.  David never remarried, devoting the remaining nine years of his life to bringing p his family of nine children.    David continued to cultivate the farm, carried mail, and may have also worked as a coal miner.  The circumstances surrounding his death in 1905 are questionable.  One report is that he died while drying dynamite and the other is that he was lost in an avalanche while carrying mail.  The nine children of David and Rosabell are:  William L (1881),  Sophia Mariah (1882)  Anna  Amelia (1884),  Zella (1886),  Burton Ellsworth (1888),  John DeWitt (1890), Alvin Benjamin (1892),  Genevieve Riching (1894), and Rosco Davis (1896).

M
ary Davies, daughter of William Edward, was born 14 September 1854 in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales and she died July 1934.  She married Christopher Scott Maggs in 1877 and they had seven children:  Grace (1879),  Bertha (1880),  Ida (1882),  Anna (1884),  Albert (1888),  Mabel (1890), and H Carroll (1896). 

Jane Davies, daughter of William Edward, was born 22 May 1856 in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales.  She married Richard Thomas, and they had one child,  William Edward Thomas, who was born 27 September 1884 and who died 12 October 1928.

W
illiam E Davies, son of William Edward, was born 22 February 1859 in Weathersfield, Trumbull County, Ohio, and he died 25 June 1935 in Pittsburgh, Kansas.  He married Gwendolyn Morgan and they had four children:  William E  (1891),  ElizabethMaria, and Annie.

Benjamin Davis, son of William Edward, was born 19 September 1860 in Mineral Ridge, Ohio and died 25 December 1938.  He married Ida Ellen Thrasher 29 October 1885 in Canton, Pennsylvania, daughter of Thomas Thrasher and Susannah Dustman.  Benjamin and Ida had five children:  Edna May (1887),  Jane (1889),  Mary (1892),  Russell Benjamin (1895), and T Edward (1897.

Gabriel C Davis, son of William Edward, was born 12 April 1864 in Mineral Ridge, Trumbull County, Ohio, and died 25 June 1911 in Mineral Ridge, Ohio.  He married Rhoda Maria Morgan 12 April 1887, daughter of Daniel Morgan and Rhoda Morris.   and they had five children:  Benjamin,  HenryRoy Gabriel (born 30 January 1888 in Mineral Ridge, Ohio and he died 7 June 1914.  Roy died while swimming, just before he was to receive a degree in law from the University of Michigan.),  Edward William (born 3 April 1892 in Cornersburg, Ohio and he died 19 November 1964), and Marie Rhoda ( born 24 July, 1894 in Mineral Ridge, Trumbull County, Ohio; died 01 November, 1983 in North Miami, Florida)  Marie Rhoda Davis married  Harry Martin Knight 28 December, 1920 in Newton Falls, Trumbull County, Ohio, son of John Knight and Mary Bunts, and they had three children.

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