Black male, born about 1857 in Missouri. He did of chronic interstitial nephritis with uremia on 22 September 1937 in Pensacola, Florida. At the time of his death he was about 80 years old; his occupation was given as Laborer on the waterfront, which job he had been working up until his last illness. His marital status was unknown. He had been at that job for 10 years. The informant, T.W. Morrison of 2118 N. Tarragona St., did not know anything about Mr. Campbell’s parents. Mr. Campbell himself died at 17 N. Tarragona Street in Pensacola, which was also his last residence. W.R. Anderson signed as the physician, having treated Mr. Campbell for two days, and Mr. Campbell was buried in the Escambia County Poor Farm cemetery on 24 September 1937 by Morris Funeral Home.
I believe “Sy” to be Silas Campbell, a Black laborer listed at 413 N. Tarragona St. in the 1936 Pensacola City Directory. T.W. Morrison, the informant, was Rev. Theodore W. Morrison, pastor at Friendship Baptist Church, residing at 2116 N. Tarragona in the 1938 City Directory. There are no entries in the extant City Directories for the previous ten years for a man with the name Silas or Sy Campbell.
There was a man of color named Silas Campbell, of about the right age, married to Eva, in Missouri, but this man died in Missouri in 1936. There was also a white man named Silas Campbell living in the Gulf Coast area in the 1920s and 1930s who was a notorious bank robber (which may explain the nickname “Sy,” to differentiate himself from the convicted criminal). Otherwise, I can find no one I can positively identify as our Sy Campbell in the records.
SOURCES:
Death certificate of Sy Campbell (No. 15520). Florida Certificate of Death, Florida Deaths, 1877-1939. Database. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2016. Index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City.
Ancestry.com. U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.