Civil War Veteran to be Honored With New Headstone After Decades of Family Search

A piece of local history will soon be memorialized in Marlow Cemetery, as a new government-issued headstone is set to be placed on the grave of Civil War veteran David Lowery Willis. The journey to this moment has been decades in the making, led by his great-great-granddaughter, Linda Ransom, who grew up in Marlow and has deep roots in the community.

Ransom, a 1963 Marlow High School valedictorian, spent her childhood in the care of her grandmother, Cecile Davis, great-aunt Ola Mae Willis, and their father, James H. Willis, the son of a Civil War veteran. Though family lore included vague references to Willis’s service, it wasn’t until James’s passing that Ransom discovered David L. Willis’s Civil War discharge papers among family belongings.

“My great-grandfather and his brother even built the stone building on Main and Broadway,” Ransom reflected, highlighting her family’s longstanding presence in Marlow. Yet, the true story of her ancestor’s military service remained hidden until her retirement, when a renewed interest in genealogy sent her searching through cemetery records.

Ransom’s persistence paid off: with the help of cemetery staff, she located the graves of both her great-great-grandmother Caroline and David Willis, marked only by a large rock. She arranged for simple grave markers for other relatives in the same plot. But the quest did not stop there. Inspired by the official military headstone of a Revolutionary War ancestor in North Carolina, Ransom wondered if her Civil War veteran relative might also qualify for such an honor.

With the assistance of Homer Cobb, who managed the paperwork, Ransom applied for a government-issued Civil War headstone for Willis. Although the headstone has yet to arrive, plans are being made for a possible dedication ceremony, potentially including a 21-gun salute from a Ft Sill group.

“I doubt that anyone outside my immediate family would be interested in attending, but—well, who knows,” Ransom mused. “How many times in your lifetime do you get to see a Civil War veteran’s headstone and ceremony?”

Once placed, the new headstone will serve as a permanent tribute to David Lowery Willis’s service and to the determination of a family to preserve their history.