The Ancestry of Nathaniel Martin

Relatively little is known of Nathaniel Martin’s forebears -- certainly less is available than we have about the ancestry of his wife, Hannah Strader. The blank slate quality is particularly true in the case of the line of Nathaniel’s father, James Martin. What we do have is not reliable. For example, Nathaniel’s biography in the 1901 volume, Commemorative Biographical Record of the Counties of Rock, Green, Grant, Iowa, and Lafayette, Wisconsin, states that his paternal grandfather was born in Ireland. It also states Nathaniel’s maternal grandfather was born in England, which is known to be untrue. The English immigration occurred a generation further back, and the same was probably true of the Irish one. James Martin’s parents were probably both Virginians. Certainly, if one or both of them were in fact Irish, they arrived in the Colonies in childhood. By the 1770s, when James was born, they were living in Bedford County, VA. Bedford, from which Franklin County would be created in 1785 -- the Martins being residents of that fraction of Bedford -- consists in part of Appalachian eastern foothill country. Both the Martin and the Pearcy families were associated with Bedford County (and then Franklin County) for many decades, beginning as early as the 1730s and extending up into the 1810s. (Some of the clan remained even after that, but not those whose lines will be discussed here.) It was in Franklin County that James married Rebecca Pearcy 18 October 1811. (The wedding is also listed in a within-the-family record as occurring 9 October 1811. It may be the eighteenth was the date the marriage was recorded, and the ninth the date of the wedding itself. More research is needed to resolve the issue.) James Martin was surely connected to some or even all of the many Martins who lived in that area in colonial days and beyond. Alas, Martin is such a common name it is a challenge to sort out where James fits among all that potential kin.

The Commemorative Record specifies Nathaniel’s birthplace as Harpers Ferry. This is not near Bedford or Franklin Counties; it is practically in Maryland. Other records strongly hint that the household remained in Franklin County past 1820, so how was it that James and Rebecca were in Harpers Ferry in 1816? Perhaps it was a temporary haven. Or perhaps the biography was wrong. Maybe Nathaniel’s birthplace had a name that ended in Ferry, and the interviewer “heard” the name of a more famous place.

The composition of the Martin/Pearcy family is described in the Commemorative Record as ten children. The group listed there consists of Sidney, Redmond, Isaiah, Elias, Nathaniel, Rebecca, Nancy, Charles, Polly (who died in childhood), and one whose name was not given. This would appear to be the birth order, except that Polly and the unnamed child have been placed after Charles Alexander Martin, who is believed to have been the very youngest of the brood, born in about 1828 or 1829. Given that the wedding of James and Rebecca occurred in 1811 and that Nathaniel, the fifth child, was born in late 1816, Mrs. Martin was pregnant three-quarters of the time during the first six years of the marriage. The unnamed child may have been Samuel, whose name is included in notes composed by Nathaniel’s great-granddaughter Sarah Jeanette Hodge. The names of the other nine on Sarah’s list are the same as in the Commemorative Record. Curiously, Sarah states elsewhere that there were eleven children, but she does not provide an additional name. Generally Sarah’s genealogical notes have proven to be reasonably accurate, but she was not born until 1909 and in the matter of Nathaniel’s siblings, may have had to depend on unreliable source material.

All ten (or eleven) Martin/Pearcy children came into the world in Virginia, as determined by looking at census records recorded later in the century. If we assume the family never actually lived in Harpers Ferry, then it is reasonable to assume that by “Virginia,” what is meant are locations that are all within Appalachian foothill country. However, not all evidence points to Bedford County or Franklin County, which are within the boundaries of modern-day Virginia. By no later than the late 1820s, the family had moved into what is now West Virginia. The birthplace of Charles Alexander Martin is cited as being in West Virginia on the death certificate of his son Isaiah, and this is considered a trustworthy reference because Isaiah’s brother Henry was the informant for that document.

Five of the group appear to have remained in the general vicinity of their birth, venturing no farther west than the Appalachian Mountains:

Meanwhile, back in the early 1850s, Nathaniel and Isaiah’s presence in Martintown and their stable circumstances must have been a lure that caused the remaining siblings to settle nearby in either Green County, WI, Stephenson County, IL, or neighboring Jo Daviess County, IL.

All the sons of James Martin and Rebecca Pearcy were said to play the fiddle -- a classic Appalachian manifestation of musical talent. Perhaps this is why Nathaniel’s descendants include many individuals with musical talent, including some who depended on it as their major source of income, examples being his great-grandaughters Hazel Cannon Rodgers, who was a piano teacher, and Margaret Eliza Hodge, who was a violin teacher.

As for parents James and Rebecca Pearcy Martin, they remained in Virginia until old age. At mentioned above, at some point they left the Bedford/Franklin region and shifted a little west, and the household appears in the 1840 census in Monroe County, with James Martin listed as the head-of-household. That record does not name the other members of the household, but it is apparent from the genders and ages given that the home was occupied by James, Rebecca, eldest daughter Sidney, son-in-law Jacob King, three King sons (the elder two the product of Jacob’s first marriage), Charles Alexander Martin, then about twelve years old, and one other male between ten and fifteen years of age. The latter may have been Samuel Martin. This tally is confirmation that by 1840, the majority of the Martin children had gone on to their independent lives or were already deceased. The census of 1850 shows that James and Rebecca had left Monroe County. Their home by then was in Raleigh County. Oddly, that census shows nearly all of their children with them, as if unmarried, yet it is probable only Charles was actually there. It is a certainty that the majority were not only out of the house, but often were living many hundreds of miles away -- thousands of miles in the case of Isaiah. It is as if the enumerator asked James if he had any children living with him, and James -- perhaps being somewhat deaf or perhaps even a little senile by then, did not hear the final part of the question and provided a list of his surviving children, no matter where they were residing. By no later than the middle of the 1850s, James and Rebecca had reached Martintown. As mentioned elsewhere, James passed away there 9 October 1856 (his and Rebecca’s 45th wedding anniversary) and he became the first family member to be buried at the crest of the hill above the mills and main house, in what would become the Martin cemetery. His tombstone states he had lived seventy-seven years (this conflicts with census records that put his birthdate in about 1775). (Photo at right taken by Robert Carpenter 1993.) His widow would marry within a year or so of his death, becoming the wife of the man referred to in the 1858 court case records as Lewis John Engert. The “most correct” spelling seems to be Enger. Record-keepers do not seem to have known how to write the name down; the man was from Norwegian Lapland and undoubtedly spoke with an accent. Confusing matters further is that he seems to have off-an-on resorted to the Scandinavian naming custom and called himself Lewis Johnson, because his father’s first name was John. The name is rendered as L.G. Anger in the 1860 census for Cadiz Township, a district that includes Martintown, Browntown, and the farms surrounding them. That document is the only one available that includes an age. Alas, it says he was thirty-nine. This does not seem credible and is probably an error. It is unlikely Rebecca managed to attract the attentions of a man thirty-one years younger than herself -- unless perhaps he thought the marriage would allow him to gain control of Nathaniel’s estate, as he tried to do in 1858. Rebecca was still alive as of the 1860 census (residing with Lewis). She does not appear in the 1870 census, when she would have been eighty years of age. Chances are high she passed away during the 1860s.

Rebecca’s ancestral line stands in much better focus than that of James, perhaps because on the Pearcy side the family appears to have spent seven, eight, or even nine decades in Bedford County, VA, some arriving as early as the 1730s. Rebecca came into the world there in about 1790. She was a child of James Pearcy and Elizabeth (Betsy) Smelser. She was one of ten children -- just as she herself would go on to become the mother of ten of her own. Her siblings were John, Martha, Jacob, Catherine, James William (known by his middle name), Mary (known as Polly), Matilda, Nathaniel (or Nathan), and Charles. Rebecca was one of the middle children in terms of birth sequence.

Betsy Smelser was a Bedford County native, born in September 1764. Her father was Paulser Smelser, the name hinting at Pennyslvania Dutch origins. He had been born in the late 1820s or early 1830s. Land records establish that he owned property in Augusta County, VA as late as 1758, a hint he and his wife Catherine (maiden name uncertain -- it may have been Miller) did not settle in Bedford County until shortly before Betsy was born. (It would have been a minimal relocation, as Augusta County is next to Bedford County.) Paulser died 25 May 1778, so he was already deceased by the time Rebecca married James Pearcy 25 April 1783, the wedding taking place in Bedford County. According to James's declaration in his pension file, he and Betsy remained in Bedford County until the early 1810s, meaning all of their children were born there. The couple reached their final home of Wayne County, KY in the late 1810s, having spent the intervening years in Franklin County, VA (which fits nicely with their daughter Rebecca having married James Martin in that county during that period). The move to Wayne County undoubted occurred because a number of their offspring had chosen to settle there, among them their son William. Wayne County was due west on the western, rather than the eastern, slopes of the Appalachians. Their home was on a farm that does not appear to have been near a town -- the nearest communities of size were Albany and the county seat of Monticello. It was a lightly settled area. Even today the population of Wayne County is astonishgly low.

James and Rebecca’s younger children were all grown not long after the Wayne County days began and the couple appear to have spent much of their time there with an “empty nest.” However, as mentioned William Pearcy lived in the county, probably on an adjacent parcel, and at least one daughter, Polly, cleaved close as well. James died 23 June 1843. Betsy’s death date is less precisely known. Her veteran’s widow benefits (at the rate of $13.33 every six months, half of what James would have received had he lingered on) continued to be paid through the spring payment of 1857, so it can be inferred that she passed away that year. That would mean she made it to ninety-two years old, verging on ninety-three. (In the March, 1855 renewal of the pension application, she claimed to be already be ninety-seven; she was in fact less than ninety-one.) This is certainly quite possible, but there is the question of whether the family was quick to report her death to the powers-that-be, knowing the payments would then be sure to cease. It is reasonable to assume she was still genuinely alive when she submitted the renewal application in 1855, because a local justice of the peace submitted a signed statement swearing that she had appeared before him in person. During her widowhood she dwelled with her daughter Polly and son-in-law Lorenzo D. Kennitzer (the name being rendered in wildly different fashion in various sources, including Carnatsey in the 1850 census -- the actual name may have been as ordinary as Kennedy, but no one back then seemed to know how to spell it).

By the time James Pearcy passed away in Wayne County in 1843, he was eighty years old. He had been born 4 May 1763. Like his wife he was a native Virginian. His family had been living in Bedford County for as much as three decades prior to his birth (unlike Rebecca’s family, who had been there only a few years at that point). Oddly enough, James himself was not a Bedford County native. His birth took place a little to the east in Buckingham County; it is unclear if the family temporarily made their home there in the early 1760s or if they happened to be passing through when his mother went into labor. James was the third of the ten children. James was just old enough to serve in the final campaign of the Revolutionary War. He served about eight months as a Colonial Army private under the command of Captain David Beard and General Nathaniel Green, fighting in the Battle of Guilford in North Carolina and then at the Battle of Yorktown, the decisive engagement of the war, culminating in victory for George Washington, Lafayette, and the American rebels. In his old age, James applied for pension benefits, and then Betsy for widow’s benefits, the pension file being one of the key sources of surviving documentation about their lives. (His name appears in that file both as James Pearcy and as James Piercy, the latter being how the clerk phonetically transcribed the name from James’s oral statement, James apparently having been illiterate, as were many men of his generation. That trait, along with the inconsistent spelling standards of the era, result in the name turning up in other sources as Peircy, Piercy, and even Percy. Some descendants use the Piercey or Piercy spellings to this day).

James’s father was John Pearcy, the second of that name (a younger brother of James was John Pearcy III). His mother was Anna Margaret Spencer. Anna had been born in Virginia in 1738 and died in Bedford County in 1836, but not much more is known of her. If you do the arithmetic, you will see she lived ninety-eight years or nearly so. This probably means the birthdate or death date -- or both -- are unreliable. The same applies to her husband John Pearcy II. He was supposedly born 10 April 1737 and died in Bedford County 28 July 1834, a lifetime of ninety-seven years.

While Anna’s origins are unknown, John Pearcy’s can be traced back one more generation. John was born in Uffculme, Devon, England. Records from that locale provide his parents’ names. They were John Pearcy (presumably the first of that name, but this is unconfirmed), born 1710 in Uffculme, and Elizabeth Webber, also a native of England. These are the only great great grandparents of Nathaniel Martin who have been identified thus far, and with them we reach the limit of current knowledge of his roots.

Nathaniel’s known ancestry tree therefore looks like so: