Buckshot in the Backside

Cyrus Hawk and Mary Catherine Franks Hawk gravestone, Dana Cemetery, Green Creek, Ohio.

On November 29, 1872, an interesting tidbit appeared in the "Ohio News Items" column of the New Philadelphia Ohio Democrat:

The season has now arrived when ignoramuses go forth with shot guns and fall over fences and off logs and come home well tattooed with shot. Cyrus Hawk, of Fremont, was the last victim.

This particular "ignoramus," Cyrus Hawk (1851-1944) of Green Creek (near Fremont), Sandusky County, Ohio, happened to be my great-great-great-great-uncle, the younger brother of my great-great-great-grandmother Clementine Hawk Flora (1849-1907). Clementine was my paternal grandmother’s great-grandmother.

I don’t want the photo I’ve posted of Uncle Cyrus’s grave to give the wrong impression—he didn’t die from accidentally shooting himself at the age of twenty. On the contrary, that incident didn’t seem to impair Cyrus much. He lived to reach ninety-two years of age and along the way he had twelve children with his wife Mary Catherine Franks Hawk (1857-1931). A note in the Hawk/Huss genealogical file in the Clyde, Sandusky County, Ohio, public library indicates that Cyrus served with the Union Army in the US Civil War. If that's correct, he was pretty young when he served, since he was twelve years old when the war ended in April 1865. Maybe he was a water boy or something like that.

If you’d like to see a nice photograph of Cyrus and Mary, there’s one here. Mary's hairstyle indicates the photo's from the 1920s. And you can see a more informal one of Cyrus alone here.