Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Charles Davis of Perry, Kentucky
On paper, “Charles Davis” ought to be the kind of name that disappears into the background of Perry County history. It is common, Anglo, and shared by more than one man on the North Fork. Yet when you start working through the records, the Davises refuse to stay generic. One Charles Davis from Hazard carried a rifle from the hills to the Olympic Games. Another Charles, born in the company town of Diablock, belongs to the generation that went off to the Second World War and died young back home. Others appear in census schedules, marriage books, and neighborhood reminiscences, their stories half glimpsed in the margins of coalfield life.
This article traces what can be said about several of the Charles Davises tied to Perry County. It also takes you through the paper trail that makes them visible, from federal census schedules and Kentucky vital records to local newspapers and family memories. Putting them together shows how a supposedly “ordinary” name can carry a surprising amount of Appalachian history.
Finding Charles Davis in the Records of Perry County
For any common name, the first place to look is the census. In Perry County, federal schedules survive from 1850 onward, with full-name, household, and occupation information by 1880 and again from 1900 through 1950. Searching those census years for Perry County through FamilySearch or Ancestry pulls up multiple Davises named Charles, Charley, Charlie, or abbreviated as “Chas,” living in and around Hazard, Diablock, Masons Creek, Grapevine, and other coal camps along the North Fork of the Kentucky River.
Those census entries do more than confirm a name. They set each Charles in a particular household and neighborhood. One might appear as a miner renting in a company row at Diablock. Another shows up as a farmer upstream on Lost Creek or Lotts Creek. Children named Charles appear as sons in Davis households, helping you trace how the name moves through generations. By making note of birth years, middle initials, and occupations, you can start to separate one Charles from another and follow them across the 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 schedules.
The statewide registration of vital statistics, which Kentucky finally standardized in 1911, adds another layer. The microfilmed series Kentucky Death Records, 1911–1965, held by the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives and indexed through sites like FamilySearch and Ancestry, includes several men named Charles or Charlie Davis whose deaths were recorded in Hazard or smaller Perry County communities. Those death certificates typically list the place of residence, occupation, cause of death, parents’ names, and burial place, often tying a Perry County Charles Davis to a specific coal camp cemetery or church burial ground.
Likewise, the Kentucky Birth Index, 1911–1999, and related birth registrations catch younger Davises named Charles who were born in Perry County and registered through the local health department. Together with death records, those entries outline a long-running Davis presence on the North Fork, and they help confirm that later figures, such as an Olympic marksman or a mid century veteran, really were born in Hazard or a nearby camp.
Marriage records are another key link in the chain, particularly because Appalachian families often cross county lines. A good example comes from Lee County’s Marriage Book 26. In June 1935, a record there notes the marriage of “Luther M. Davis” and “Marie R. Combs.” The groom was forty seven, born in Lee County and living at Tallega. His parents were listed as Charles Davis and Sallie Davis, born Powell. The bride was thirty two, born in Perry County and living at Typo, daughter of Roy and Armilda Combs. That single entry ties a Charles Davis with a Perry County daughter in law into a Davis network that straddled Lee and Perry counties, and it hints at an older Charles whose descendants scattered between the two.
For the earlier nineteenth century period, before most of the Charles Davises in this article were born, you can extend the line back through county court orders and land records. Transcriptions of “Perry County, Kentucky Records: County Court Records, 1822–1837,” edited by James Alan Williams and circulated through eastern Kentucky historical societies, pull in Davises who appear on early tax lists, land transactions, and court proceedings along the North Fork and its creeks. Those older Davises establish that the family name was present in the county long before the coal boom, which helps explain why later generations show up in coal camps and county seat neighborhoods with the same surnames and given names.
Newspapers add texture and detail that the strict forms cannot. Hazard’s long running paper, the Hazard Herald, survives in scattered runs through the Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program and digitized microfilm on sites like the Internet Archive. Issues from the mid twentieth century include obituaries, accident reports, mining and highway deaths, WPA and NYA notices, and small items about local boys home from the service. They also publish photos and captions about vocational programs, sports teams, and civic clubs. It is in those kinds of pages that you find a captioned photograph of a “Charles Davis, both of Happy,” enrolled in a forty four week Mine Repairmen Training Course at the Hazard State Vocational School, or a service list naming a Charles Davis who has shipped out for training.
Finally, there are the informal archives that mountain genealogists increasingly draw on: local history blogs, community Facebook pages, Find A Grave memorials, and digitized family scrapbooks. The Hazard Ancestry blog, for example, republishes mid century columns and neighborhood reminiscences once printed in the local newspapers. In one entry, a writer recalling his childhood on Laurel Street in Hazard lists the families along the block and remembers “Charles Davis and his little brother Bobby” living down the line, alongside the Bevans and the Horns. That memory does not give birth or death dates, but it places a Davis household in a particular street level geography that the census and plat maps also show.
When you layer all of these sources together, the generic name “Charles Davis” begins to resolve into several specific lives. The best documented of them ultimately carried Hazard’s name to the Olympic Games.
From Hazard to Munich: MSG Charles D. Davis
The clearest and most fully documented Charles Davis from Perry County is Master Sergeant Charles D. Davis, a Hazard born rifleman who rose to world class status in American marksmanship. His obituaries and competition records agree that he was born on 12 February 1927 in Hazard, Kentucky, the son of Chester Arthur Davis and Florence Hall Davis. Family history work and census entries place Chester’s roots on Lost Creek, in neighboring Breathitt County, and trace the family into Hazard’s Magisterial District 4 during the coal boom years between the wars, where Chester worked to support a growing household.
Later biographical notes in Olympic reference works describe Charles’s boyhood in the hills of eastern Kentucky, where he taught himself to hit birds with a slingshot and learned to handle a rifle on improvised targets near home. Those details have the ring of family story, but they also fit the landscape of Hazard’s outlying neighborhoods, where open hillsides and strip mine benches offered plenty of space for a determined boy to practice.
During the closing months of the Second World War, Davis enlisted in the United States Navy and saw service in 1945 and 1946. After demobilization he studied at Centre College in Danville on the G.I. Bill. In 1955 he joined the United States Army, and by the later 1950s he was assigned to the newly formed U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit at Fort Benning, Georgia, an elite program meant to sharpen military shooting and to represent the United States in international competition.
From that point forward, his life was intertwined with a rifle and a global competitive circuit. Match programs and marksmanship histories show Davis winning major national and international titles in several smallbore and high power disciplines over the next two decades. In 1961 he took a National Rifle Association title in smallbore three position, shooting for the Army. Through the 1960s he added interservice championships and long range trophies to his record. At the Camp Perry National Matches, he stood on the firing line in events that brought together military and civilian shooters from across the United States.
Davis’s specialty eventually became the running target event, which required the shooter to fire quickly and accurately at a target that moved across a track, simulating a moving game animal. In that discipline he reached the top of the sport. Olympic and world championship records list him as a world champion in running target in 1970 and again in 1974, winning individual gold medals at the International Shooting Sport Federation World Championships. He also helped the U.S. team secure medals in team running target events and competed in other rifle disciplines at Pan American and CISM (military) competitions.
The high water mark of his public visibility came in 1972, when Davis represented the United States in the 50 meter running target event at the Munich Olympic Games. He did not leave with a medal, but his presence on the U.S. team meant that, for a few days on an Olympic range in Bavaria, a man from Hazard, Kentucky stood at the firing line in the Olympic colors. For Perry Countians used to seeing their neighbors’ names in coal production tallies or casualty lists, that was a very different kind of headline.
Davis’s military career extended beyond the range. Obituaries note that he served in both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts and rose to the rank of Master Sergeant in the U.S. Army, spending many years with the Marksmanship Unit at Fort Benning. His long record of competition and service earned him a place in several halls of fame. The Amateur Trapshooting Association and military marksmanship associations remember him as a disciplined, technically gifted shooter and a mentor to younger riflemen.
Later in life, Davis remained connected to the broader Olympic movement. One obituary records that he was chosen to carry the Olympic torch during part of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic torch relay, a ceremonial role that symbolically tied his mid century athletic career to a new generation of American Olympians. When he died in 2018 in Columbus, Georgia, his funeral notices emphasized both his Hazard origins and his national and international marksmanship record, and he was inurned at Arlington National Cemetery.
From an Appalachian historian’s vantage point, Charles D. Davis’s life touches familiar themes. His parents came out of Lost Creek and the surrounding hills into a coal era county seat. He grew up with the outdoors and with firearms as tools and pastimes. Military service opened up a world beyond Perry County, and his particular skill with a rifle let him carve out a career that linked eastern Kentucky to Fort Benning, Munich, and world championships. The trail of documents that confirm those facts runs from Hazard’s birth records and the federal census to Olympic databases and national match programs. Together, they anchor a global story in a very specific Appalachian birthplace.
Diablock’s Charlie Davis: A Short Life Between War and Coal
Not every Charles Davis from Perry County left such a long, public record. A second man, remembered in modern genealogical compilations as Charles “Charlie” Davis of Diablock, appears primarily in the vital records of mid twentieth century coal country. His Find A Grave memorial records him as born on 14 October 1923 in Diablock, Perry County, and as having died on 30 July 1949 in Hazard. The memorial marks him as a veteran and links to census entries for Perry County that place him in the local population in 1930 and 1940.
Diablock itself was a company town just south of Hazard, established and named for the Diamond Block Coal Company. The Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer notes that the community took its name directly from the company and that its post office operated from 1916 until 1948, roughly the years when men like Charlie grew up and worked there. The camp lay along the railroad and highway that carried coal, goods, and people in and out of the county seat.
Born there in 1923, Charlie Davis belonged to the generation of Perry County boys who came of age during the Great Depression and were in their late teens and early twenties when the United States entered the Second World War. The “veteran” notation on his memorial fits that pattern, and surviving draft registrations and enlistment records indexed by genealogy sites suggest that a Charles Davis from Perry County registered or served during the war. The details of his service, units, and postings would have to be reconstructed from those federal military records and any local newspaper coverage of returning servicemen.
His early death in 1949, at twenty five, falls into a period when coal camp and highway accidents, mine injuries, and postwar health problems frequently appeared in Hazard Herald columns. A close search of the 1949 issues, which survive on microfilm and in scattered digital scans, would likely turn up an obituary or news item that explains the circumstances. Whatever the cause, the record as it stands shows a short life that spans from a coal company town birth to a postwar death in the county seat, bracketed by military service.
If the Olympian Charles D. Davis represents the extraordinary path out of Perry County, Charlie of Diablock represents a more common one: a local boy whose life follows the familiar arc from camp childhood to wartime uniform and back to work or community life, before an early death closes the record. The sources that preserve his outline are more fragmentary, but they are still part of the same county level and national paper trail.
Other Charles Davises in and around Hazard
Even beyond these two men, the records hint at additional Charles Davises whose lives intersect Perry County in the mid twentieth century.
The Hazard Herald photograph of a Charles Davis from Happy enrolled in a Mine Repairmen Training Course at the Hazard State Vocational School places another man of that name squarely in the mid century coal economy. A captioned photograph in a local paper is an almost perfect snapshot: it tells you where he lived, what kind of training he was receiving, and approximately when. It also hints at the changing technology of the mines. A mine repairman in a crash vocational course belongs to the era when mechanization and safety standards were reshaping coal work.
Neighborhood memories add still more faces. In the Hazard Ancestry recollection of Laurel Street in the 1930s and 1940s, a writer remembers living in a row of houses that included a “Charles Davis and his little brother Bobby,” part of a wider cluster of families that also included Whitleys, Bevans, Horns, and others. No dates or middle initials are given, but the context places this Charles in a town neighborhood rather than a coal camp, in a setting of bicycles, school, and Sunday School League basketball. Combined with census schedules and school records, that little mention can help local researchers connect him to other Davises on the North Fork.
Some men named Charles Davis connected to Perry County appear primarily in compiled genealogies rather than in a single dramatic document. One such figure is Charles Blaine Davis, born in 1896 and dying in 1952, whose FamilySearch profile and linked census entries trace him and his household into Masons Creek, a rural but coal influenced community in Perry County, by the 1930s and 1940s. His records show the familiar mix of farming, day labor, and coal work that defined much of the county’s economy during those decades.
Another is Burley Charles Davis, whose compiled records note that he was born in West Virginia in 1909 and died in Hazard in 1983. He may or may not be closely related to the other Davises discussed here, but his path points to a different pattern: men who came into Perry County from other coalfields, worked and settled in Hazard, and were buried there. Later obituaries for a more recent Perry County man named Burley Venson Davis show the surname and given name pattern persisting in the county into the twenty first century.
Taken together, these scattered references suggest a cluster of Davises, some of them named Charles, who lived along Hazard’s streets and in its nearby camps, married into Combs and other local families, and sat for photographs, draft boards, and vocational school publicity shots. Sorting out which Charles is which requires careful use of middle initials, birth dates, parents’ names, and addresses, but the work pays off by revealing how deeply a supposedly “ordinary” name was woven into the life of the county.
Why Names Like Charles Davis Matter in Appalachian History
From a distance, “Charles Davis” can look like a placeholder. Appended to a common Anglo surname, it seems almost designed to vanish into the mass of local records. Yet the Perry County evidence shows how much history can hide behind such a name.
One Charles Davis from Hazard became an Olympian and world champion shooter, carrying the memory of his eastern Kentucky beginnings into international arenas while serving for decades in the U.S. military. Another Charles Davis from Diablock lived a much shorter life that likely included wartime service and a return to the coalfields, ending in an early death recorded on a Kentucky death certificate and a modest grave in a local cemetery. Others show up in vocational training photos and neighborhood reminiscences, their lives anchored in city streets and coal town lanes.
For an Appalachian historian, working through these names is not just a matter of genealogy. It shows how family networks like the Davises of Lost Creek, Masons Creek, and Hazard link rural farm communities, coal company towns, and the county seat. It illustrates the ways in which common men from Perry County entered national narratives through military service, migration, or sports, while still leaving traces in local sources that can be studied at the county level.
Most of all, it reminds us that the mountain past is built not only from the stories of unusually named individuals or famous outsiders, but also from the careful reconstruction of lives that, on first glance, look the same. When you take the time to follow a name like Charles Davis through census pages, death certificates, newspaper clippings, and family memories, Perry County’s history becomes more detailed and more human.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Census Bureau. United States Census, 1900–1950: Perry County, Kentucky, population schedules. Database with images. FamilySearch and Ancestry. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org and https://www.ancestry.com.
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Kentucky, Death Records, 1911–1965. Database with images. FamilySearch. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/1985532.
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Kentucky, Birth Index, 1911–1999. Index. Ancestry. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8793.
Lee County, Kentucky. Marriage Book 26, 1933–1936. Transcript, “Lee County, KY Marriage Book 26,” Lee County KYGenWeb/USGenNet. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://files.usgennet.org/ky/lee/mb26.htm.
Williams, James Alan. County Court Records, 1822–1837, Perry County, Kentucky. Banner, KY: Williams, 2007. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005D3JNAW.
Hazard Herald (Hazard, Kentucky). The Hazard Herald, 1911–1975. Microfilm and digital issues via Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program, University of Kentucky Libraries; Internet Archive; and Chronicling America, Library of Congress. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn85052003 and https://archive.org/details/kentuckynewspapers.
Find a Grave. “Charles ‘Charlie’ Davis.” Memorial page, Perry County, Kentucky. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com.
Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer. “Diablock, Perry County.” University of Kentucky Geography. Accessed January 20, 2026. http://www.uky.edu/KentuckyAtlas/diablock.html.
Hazard Ancestry. “Pepsi Cola & Moon Pies: Growing up in Hazard during the 30s & 40s.” Hazard Ancestry (blog), November 28, 2014. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://hazardancestry.wordpress.com/2014/11/28/hazard-blog-archive.
FamilySearch and Ancestry. Compiled genealogies and indexed records for the families of Charles Blaine Davis (1896–1952), Burley Charles Davis (1909–1983), and related Davis households in Perry County, Kentucky. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org and https://www.ancestry.com.
FamilySearch Research Wiki. “Perry County, Kentucky Genealogy.” FamilySearch. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Perry_County,_Kentucky_Genealogy.
Johnson, Eunice Tolbert. History of Perry County, Kentucky. Hazard, KY: Hazard Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, 1953.
“Olympedia: Charles Davis.” Olympedia. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/44629.
“Charles Davis (sport shooter).” Wikipedia. Last modified December 26, 2024. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Davis_(sport_shooter).
McMullen Funeral Home and Crematory. “Charles Davis Obituary.” McMullen Funeral Home and Crematory (Columbus, Georgia), 2018. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://www.mcmullenfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Charles-Davis-65.
“Perry County, Kentucky Newspapers and Obituaries.” LDSGenealogy.com. Accessed January 20, 2026. https://ldsgenealogy.com/KY/Perry-County-Newspapers-and-Obituaries.htm.
Author Note: Working through the many Charles Davises of Perry County reminded me how much Appalachian history hides behind “ordinary” names. I hope this piece encourages you to look again at the familiar names in your own family records and local cemeteries.