Many states are digitizing death certificates and uploading images of older deaths to genealogy databases. North Carolina is one such state.
230+ years ago my mother's ancestors lived in Davidson and Montgomery counties, North Carolina. This was long before her branch split and moved to Texas. Several had moved after fighting for the losing side in, you know, THAT war. This year I was surprised to learn from Ancestry that I have many many cousins still in those same two counties.
One day while browsing death records of these distant cousins, I did a double take on one death certificate. See the cause of death? The handwriting makes it difficult to decipher:
WTH? I immediately went to newspaper archives in search of articles.
An ugly story unfolded. A particularly horrific shock for their families, I would imagine.
Was it murder or murder-suicide? I found no further news articles.