Norfolk City Virginia USGenWeb Archives Obituaries.....McGregor, Elizabeth A. July 15, 1917
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Robert Woolfitt http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00034.html#0008401 August 11, 2023, 1:40 pm

Virginian-Pilot July 21, 1917
After drifting for five days in the waters of Chesapeake Bay, the body of Miss 
Elizabeth McGregor, drowned at Ocean View Sunday morning, was discovered near 
Cape Charles yesterday. Miss McGregor, a pretty, 21-year-old girl met her death 
when the rising tide left her on a sandbar. Unable to regain the shore without 
going above her head and unable to swim, she was lost beneath the surface before 
help could come from shore. Two of her companions – Mrs. M. A. Thomas, her 
sister, and Miss Mabel Sheets, an intimate friend – were almost spent with 
exhaustion when brought to shore by occupants of cottages on the beach.
Continued dragging of the bottom was without result. Soon after the girl was 
drowned, nets were procured and men began to drag. A last rising tide, however, 
had washed the body far away. Not until it was sighted yesterday by men on the 
fishing steamer Rappahannock had there been a sign to justify hopes that hers 
would not be another of the bodies not given up by the sea.
Miss McGregor’s body was sighted shortly after 10 o’clock yesterday morning, 
floating in North Channel, between Cape Charles and Fishermen’s Island. As soon 
as the fishing boat landed at Cape Charles, Coroner W. F. D. Williams was 
notified by Captain W. T. Tolson and impaneled a jury. It brought in a verdict 
of accidental death by drowning.
It was through The Virginian-Pilot that the body was identified. W. F. D. 
Williams, at Cape Charles, telegraphed immediately after the Rappahannock 
docked, to ask The Virginian-Pilot to secure identification, locate relatives 
and to wire instructions for the disposition of the body. He described the body 
as being that of a young woman about five feet five inches in height, and with 
dark hair. The girl, he said, wore a black bathing suit, with white stockings 
and white slippers. About her neck was a bathhouse check No. 19.
Mrs. Thomas, the girl’s oldest sister and with whom she had been living since 
the death of their mother, almost broke down from grief when a reporter 
telephoned her yesterday afternoon to say that the body had been located. The 
suspense under which she had been laboring since, helpless, she struggled in the 
water and watched her pretty, young sister sink beneath the waves, had told upon 
her.
The Virginian-Pilot notified her father, too, locating him at Ocean View and 
assisted in making arrangements to have the body sent to Norfolk early this 
morning. Miss McGregor was a member of Sacred Heart Roman Catholic church.
Miss McGregor was born in Derby, Conn., but had lived for 13 years in Norfolk. 
She was a daughter of Archibald McGregor, now living in Washington, and the late 
Honorah McGregor. She is survived by a brother, James McGregor, of Yonkers, 
N.Y., and by the two sisters, with whom she lived at the Powhatan apartments, 
Fourteenth street and DeBree avenue, Mrs. M. A. Thomas and Miss Anna McGregor. 
The funeral will take place at 4:30 o’clock at Oliver’s funeral apartments. 
Burial will be in St. Mary’s cemetery.


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