Death database peers into Missouri's past

On the surface, former Missouri Lt. Gov. Thomas Reynolds had everything: a wife, community stature, a law practice in St. Louis.

But a coroner's inquest conducted at Lynch's Undertaking Establishment tells a different story of Reynolds, who left Missouri briefly during the Civil War with other Confederate exiles.

A friend said Reynolds had seemed nervous the morning of his death on March 30, 1887, unable even to concentrate on his morning newspaper.

"He was laboring under an irresistible impulse to destroy himself," George Maverick told the St. Louis coroner investigating the suspicious death.

Reynolds plunged three floors to his death down the freight elevator shaft at the U.S. Custom House in St. Louis. Tucked in his pocket was a sealed envelope, with instructions not to open it until after his death.

This and other richly detailed stories from coroner's inquests in St. Louis and six Missouri counties are now online at the Missouri secretary of state's Web site as abstracts, indexed for the first time, to access the major collection.

The time period varies by county, but together, they cover 1842 to 1932.

State archivist Kenneth Winn said the records, which in some cases predate newspaper records, offer a unique look into 19th- and early 20th-century life in St. Louis and the counties of Andrew, Cape Girardeau, Clinton, Perry, St. Francois and Stoddard. Other counties will be added.

Coroner's inquests were medical and legal investigations into deaths resulting from something other than natural causes. They often were conducted on the spot, and in locations as varied as saloons and undertaker parlors. Their witness depositions reveal the language and color of the time.

Winn said the records are a primary research tool for genealogists and scholars, but have been underused and underappreciated.

They recreate immigrant neighborhoods, and offer insights into homicide and suicide rates, the Populist farm movement, urban industrial strife, skirmishes between Bushwackers and Union troops, and, as in the case of Reynolds, a person's state of mind in the hours before death, Winn said.

They're useful to researchers of social or ethnic violence, labor, farm-to-urban migration, and the stress of living in the 1800s and early 1900s.

They even suggest what motivated the Temperance Movement.

"American society was drunk in the 1830s and '40s," Winn said. "There was lots of alcoholic death."

And apparently, pockets of hopelessness, too. The database contains 2,871 suicides. There were many deaths by drowning in river communities. Cape Girardeau County lists 32 drownings during the 90-year period. One fourth of the deaths investigated in St. Francois County, in Missouri's mineral belt, resulted from mining accidents.

The original coroner's inquest records, penned with flourishes or typed, are stored in modern-day coroner's offices across Missouri, such as in the basement, right next to the morgue, of the St. Louis medical examiner's office.

Most have been microfilmed to preserve the contents of the fragile, brittle papers. Researchers are advised to use the online resource to do a name or category search.

They can request a copy of the microfilmed coroner's report by e-mailing the State Archives. Microfilmed reports from St. Louis are at the St. Louis County Library and St. Louis City Hall.

The early 1840s records tend to be brief, but they grow by the late 19th century, Winn said.

The death of levee hand William Lyons in Curtis' Saloon in St. Louis by "Stag" Lee Shelton, also known as "Stagger Lee," "Stagolee," and other variations, became legendary in the South, and the story was told in a hit R&B record in 1950.

The coroner's report said the friends had quarreled in a bar over a hat on Christmas night 1895. Shelton fired the fatal shot, and was later arrested. Lyons died at City Hospital early the next morning.

Stanford University law professor Lawrence Friedman praised Missouri's efforts, and sees the coroner's inquests as a resource for social, legal and criminal justice historians. His own students have used them.

"They cast light on the underbelly of American history," he said. "They're mostly about losers, people who went off to make a fortune and didn't."