Elizabeth (Donmyer) Reynolds — my 4th great-grandaunt
On the afternoon of May 31, 1889, the borough of Woodvale, Pennsylvania, simply stopped existing. It took less than ten minutes.
South Fork Dam, fourteen miles upstream from Johnstown, had been holding back Lake Conemaugh — a private mountain reservoir built for a fishing and hunting club used by some of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest families. After days of torrential spring rain, the dam gave way that afternoon, unleashing an estimated twenty million tons of water down the narrow Conemaugh Valley.
Cottages of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club on the shore of Lake Conemaugh. Members included Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and future Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.
The final breach of the South Fork Dam, May 31, 1889.
By the time the flood reached Johnstown, it was moving an estimated forty miles an hour, carrying trees, railroad cars, entire houses, animals, and people. Woodvale — a tight mill town of about a thousand residents just outside Johnstown, home to the Cambria Iron Company’s woolen mill — sat directly in its path. More than 314 of Woodvale’s residents were killed in a matter of minutes, nearly a third of the borough’s population.
A Woodvale-area house impaled by debris carried in the flood — a common sight across the valley in the flood’s aftermath.
Among the dead were Elizabeth Reynolds, age 40, and her daughter Idella Reynolds, age 14.
Elizabeth had been born Elizabeth Donmyer on June 6, 1847, in Richland Township, Cambria County, one of thirteen children of Lewis Donmyer Sr. and Catherine Shaffer, a farming family in the German-settled hill country east of Johnstown. In 1872 she married Archibald B. Reynolds in Cambria City, and the couple settled in Woodvale, where they raised their family. They had at least two daughters: Idella, born around 1874–75, and Lucy, born in 1881, who survived the flood.
The 1880 federal census, taken nine years before the flood, records the family living together in the 2nd Ward of Conemaugh Borough: Archibald Reynolds, 33, a clerk at a planing mill; Elizabeth, 31, keeping house; and Idella, 6, at school.
Archibald, Elizabeth, and Idella Reynolds, 1880 U.S. Federal Census, 2nd Ward, Conemaugh Borough, Cambria County, PA (household 2, family 2).
When the flood came, Elizabeth and Idella were swept away together. Neither body was ever recovered.
Site of Central Park after the Flood.
The Franklin St. Methodist Church in the background survived the flood and protected buildings behind it.
Their names appear in the official roll of the dead, first compiled by survivors and published in the Johnstown Tribune on July 31, 1890 — more than a year after the disaster, once the town had finished the agonizing work of accounting for who was missing and who was gone for good:
Reynolds, Mrs. Elizabeth, 40, Woodvale, missing.
Reynolds, Idella, 14, Woodvale, missing.
“Missing” was the list’s designation for flood victims whose remains were never identified — lost downstream, buried in the debris field that piled thirty feet high against Johnstown’s Stone Bridge, or lost when that same wreckage caught fire that evening and burned for hours with people still trapped inside it. Of the roughly 2,209 people killed in the Johnstown Flood, nearly a third were never identified at all.
A period illustration of the fire that broke out in the debris jam at Johnstown’s Stone Bridge on the evening of the flood — one of the disaster’s most harrowing scenes.
General view of debris jammed against the Stone Bridge, with the Cambria Iron Company’s mills visible in the background.
Grandview Cemetery in Johnstown holds a public plot for flood victims whose bodies were recovered but never identified. Elizabeth and Idella’s records are marked “missing” rather than that plot’s burial code, meaning their bodies were never recovered at all.
A portrait of Elizabeth survives in a family photo album: a formal studio photograph of a young woman in a striped dress, her hand resting on the arm of a chair. Beneath it, in the careful handwriting of a family member who kept the album afterward, is a single line — “Elizabeth Dornmyer Reynold — Lost in Johnstown flood.”
Elizabeth (Donmyer) Reynolds, from a family photo album.
Today, Idella’s name is inscribed at the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, run by the National Park Service near the site of the old South Fork Dam, alongside those of the flood’s other victims.
Idella Reynolds’ name at the Johnstown Flood National Memorial.
Elizabeth’s family had roots that reached beyond Cambria County. Her brother, Simon Peter Donmyer, left Pennsylvania in 1872 — the same year Elizabeth married — and headed west, eventually founding the town of New Cambria, Saline County, Kansas, naming it after the county he’d left behind. Brother and sister took very different paths out of Cambria County: one built a town on the plains that still bears its name; the other never made it out of Woodvale.
How Elizabeth Connects to This Family
Elizabeth’s own line of descendants did not continue in this family tree — her connection runs instead through her sister, Mary Donmyer. Mary’s daughter Margaret King married Jonathan Helsel, carrying the Donmyer family directly into the Helsel line documented in the family GEDCOM (family groups F221, F75, and F250):
| Lewis Donmyer Sr. + Catherine Shaffer | Cambria County farming family; parents of thirteen children, including Elizabeth and her sister Mary |
| ↳ Mary Donmyer | Elizabeth’s sister — married William King, 1850, Richland Twp., Cambria Co. |
| ↳ Margaret King | Daughter of Mary Donmyer & William King — married Jonathan Helsel, 1874 |
| ↳ George Washington Helsel | Son of Jonathan Helsel & Margaret King |
| ↳ Percy Nelson Helsel | Married Olive Elizabeth Varner, 1923 |
| ↳ George Jay Helsel | Son of Percy Nelson Helsel |
| ↳ Diane Helsel Hutsky | Daughter of George Jay Helsel |
| ↳ Walter Hutsky Jr. | Son of Diane Helsel Hutsky |
In short: Elizabeth Reynolds was the sister of Walt’s 4th great-grandmother, Mary Donmyer King — making Elizabeth his 4th great-grandaunt.
Supporting Records
The parent family of Elizabeth and Mary Donmyer is documented in the 1850 federal census for Richland Township, Cambria County, showing Lewis Donmyer (listed as “Louis Dormayer”), a farmer with $9,215 in real estate, and his household including sons Jacob, Simon B., and Lewis Jr., and daughters Susanna, Sarah, Catherine, and others.
Lewis Donmyer (“Dormayer”) household, 1850 U.S. Federal Census, Richland Township, Cambria County, PA (dwelling 134, family 140).
Note on a source discrepancy: this 1850 census lists Lewis’s age as 58, which would place his birth around 1792 — several years earlier than the December 1799 birth date recorded elsewhere in the family GEDCOM (sourced to Findagrave and additional records). Age misreporting of this kind is common in 1850-era census records, and it does not affect the identification of the family; it’s noted here rather than smoothed over, per this family history’s practice of flagging rather than resolving discrepancies without further primary documentation.
Sources
Johnstown Tribune, July 31, 1890 — original published roll of the victims of the 1889 Johnstown Flood, organized by burial location; sourced via the Johnstown Area Heritage Association / Johnstown Flood Museum (jaha.org)
South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club membership records, Johnstown Area Heritage Association / Johnstown Flood National Memorial (NPS)
“Johnstown Flood No. 15, General View of Debris,” copyright 1889 Langill & Darling; Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division
Family photograph and handwritten album caption of Elizabeth (Donmyer) Reynolds
1880 U.S. Federal Census, 2nd Ward, Conemaugh Borough, Cambria County, PA — Reynolds household
1850 U.S. Federal Census, Richland Township, Cambria County, PA — Donmyer household
Johnstown Flood National Memorial, National Park Service
Biographical sketch of Simon P. Donmyer, Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History (Blackmar), and New Cambria, Kansas historical materials
Johnstown Area Heritage Association, jaha.org, for general background on the flood and Woodvale
Family GEDCOM: The Hutsky–Helsel–Shepko–Mihalick–Varner–Horner Families of Cambria County (family groups F221, F75, F250) for the Donmyer–King–Helsel lineage connection
