Davis Deaths Rise 183-Fold as a Great American Name Comes Due

Walk through any American cemetery old enough to have Civil War stones and you will find a Davis carved in granite — the name has been a fixture of this country since before there was a country. Now, across 185 obituary records collected between 2019 and 2026, that deep generational presence is asserting itself in a quieter way: the frequency of Davis deaths in the data has surged by a factor of more than 183, a sharp rise that reflects the massive cohort of mid-century Davises reaching the end of long lives. The average age at death sits at 72.7 years, nearly four years below CDC life expectancy figures of 76.4 and 1.8 years under the national obituary average of 74.5. That gap — modest but persistent — raises questions about what the name tracks: economic geography, racial composition, regional health disparities, or simply the wide statistical net that the seventh most common American surname casts across every demographic fault line in the country.