[Isaac] Ebey, the island’s first justice of the peace, conducted an inquest May 23 [of 1853] at Oak Harbor.
Nikola Tesla was born into an ethnic Serb family in the village of Smiljan, within the Military Frontier, in the Austrian Empire (present-day Croatia), on 10 July 1856.
The first recorded death was noted on May 22, 1853, when settlers discovered the body of Judah Church in the woods of his claim near Oak Harbor. A coroner’s inquest was hastily convened at the site—official verdict, “unknown”—and the sixty-three-year-old native of Michigan was buried where he was found.