Thursday, July 1, 2010

The Curious Case of Elias Martin

Elias Martin is my great-great-great-great-grandfather. (Martha-Fern-John-James-John-Elias)

He was born on April 23, 1799, somewhere in Virginia, to Obediah and Ann New Martin. He was the only child on record, of Obediah and Ann. We do not have a death date of his mother, so chances are she died young, maybe even in childbirth, and he never knew her. Somewhere during his formative years, his father and he up and moved to the new state of Kentucky.

In 1822, he married Nancy New, who was 16 at the time, and here is where the story gets interesting.

Nancy, it seems, was an orphan. Her parents, John and Elizabeth Martin New, both died sometime about when she was born, maybe 1806. The record is unclear. Most of what I have found shows them both dying in 1800. But that cannot be, if Nancy was born in 1806. So we will assume that the names of her parents are correct, and the death date must have been at about the time of her birth, 1806. So a theory develops . . .

Perhaps Ann New Martin, and John and Elizabeth Martin New, died at the same time? Maybe there was a tragedy, perhaps an Indian raid, that killed both parents of Nancy New, and the mother of Elias Martin? Maybe an epidemic went through their village. I can envision Obediah Martin taking his son and young Nancy New with him to the west. They settled for a time in Kentucky, perhaps with a group of family members from their former Virginia village.

This next part gets a little hard to follow. Obediah and Nancy New Martin were first cousins. Obediah's mother, Ann New, was the sister to Nancy New's father, John New. Obediah's father, too, was most likely a distant cousin of Nancy's mother, Elizabeth Martin.

This sounds strange to us today - but it was far more common than we realize, in these young, sparsely settled colonies.

So Obediah Martin set out with his son, Elias, and niece, Nancy New, for Kentucky. Apparently, he never married again.

In 1822, Obediah dies, in Ohio County, Kentucky. He was 52 years old. Elias, then 22, and Nancy, 16, alone in the world, bury Obediah, and then the two cousins marry. They then set off for Morgan, Illinois (between Effingham and Champaign), where their four children: John New, Margaret Ann, Francis Marion, and George Washington, were born. (These would have been the great aunts and uncles of John Dudley Martin - can you see who some of his children may have been named after?)

In 1835, at the age of 29, his cousin, step-sister, and wife, Nancy New, died in Morgan. One year later, he married his second wife, Mary Ann Wheeler. The family moved to Cahokia County, Missouri (Northeastern part of the state), and had two sons, William and Charles.

Elias finished his life in Cahokia, and died in 1886, at 87 years of age. His oldest great-grandson, John Dudley, was ten years old at the time, living in South Texas, and probably never knew him.

So, this Virginia family found its way first to Kentucky, then to central Illinois, and then to northern Missouri. These choices on migration and settlement built a loyalty to the Union states during the Civil War. The decision of Elias's grandson, James Andrew Martin, to join the Northern army would prove to be fateful for the family.

But we are left with a lot of speculation about the childhood of these two cousins, Elias Martin and Nancy New, their marriage, the fate of their parents, and the forces that compelled them West.