Back in Time: A 1915 inquest offers insight, no answers

At the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center, one of the many types of projects we work on is gathering information from publicly available sources. One such project culminated in a set of binders listing the headstones in some of Cape Girardeau County’s more than 300 known cemeteries, and another is underway.

For this project, archives assistant Tiffany Fleming pulls information from death certificates available on the Missouri Secretary of State’s Digital Heritage website — they’re searchable by last name, by county and by year, available from 1910 to cases from 50 years ago.

Death certificates can contain a wealth of information, such as who the deceased’s parents were — and their birthplaces — the deceased’s address and occupation, spouse, informant, cause of death and burial place, but that’s only in the case of a known person having died; sometimes, a person died and couldn’t be identified. Many of these were floaters in the Mississippi River, victims of crimes or catastrophes, but then there are others who simply weren’t known.

In 1915, Cape Girardeau County had two major thoroughfares: the Mississippi River and the train tracks. These criss-crossed the county, bearing goods and sometimes drifters. On Aug. 7, 1915, a mangled body was discovered one mile north of Nash, a tiny railroad community approximately six miles south of Cape Girardeau, toward Delta.

According to the inquest file, which is an investigation carried out by the coroner, no witnesses could be found, and his cause of death was determined to be that he’d either been on the track or on a train at the time of his death.

“Unable to say just what position man was in when killed … body mangled so badly, impossible to identify,” coroner E.R. Schoen wrote in the inquest documentation.

The deceased is described as being approximately 30 years old with blond hair, weight undeterminable, a No. 7 shoe size, and a 6 7/8” hat. A handkerchief with the initial “N” was found on him, but no identification or other clues.

The coroner also noted he took one and a half hours to bury the body, and he did so in the railroad’s right of way, near the junction at Mile 138 on said railroad. That line ran from Cape Girardeau to Walnut Ridge, Ark., bearing southwest. I have reviewed probably thousands of death certificates and had never seen a burial as “RR Right off way” [sic] before.

This being 1915, there was no national database of missing persons, no DNA testing to do, no real way to get answers as to who this man could have been or where he had come from. The Archive holds a set of records known collectively as inquests from 1842 to 1939. When creating these records, the coroner would call a jury to examine the evidence and attempt to determine a cause of death. Any witnesses to the death would be called to testify before the jury, and the coroner would document any personal effects, the deceased’s description, physical evidence, and any other pertinent information. Inquests were conducted when a death was suspicious or otherwise a more complicated case than simply determining cause of death — such as a homicide, accidental death or an unattended death. These inquest files can help shed light on a death that doesn’t fit neatly onto the six lines on the death certificate form or that occurred before 1910, the year Missouri first mandated death certificates.

For a genealogist or historian looking to fill out a missing piece of information, these files are a potentially rich resource.

Marybeth Niederkorn is the director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center in Jackson and holds various leadership positions dedicated to preserving and furthering the county’s rich history.