One of the interesting things you come across when you start to research family trees is the massive difference in record keeping depending on the regions you’re looking in. I have to say that I'm a bit spoiled, not only from the work of previous generations, but because the majority of my family is from New England. I’m sure it’s because those states are much older and have been colonized for a longer amount of time. The family was based mostly in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and a little bit of Maine. I even have some ancestors that immigrated from Northern Ireland to Truro, Nova Scotia as grantees. Evidently they helped to found the city. To my surprise, though maybe it shouldn't have been, while researching my husband’s tree, I found that every single person I came across, like 8 or 9 generations back on either side of his family, were LITERALLY ALL from Virginia. Like, ALL of them.
A place where all my research (and anyone else’s who has looked into it) has stopped dead (pun intended) is a man named William “Billy” Martin who was born in 1794 and died in 1870. That part of my family is from Tennessee, and the prevailing rumor was that we came from North Carolina and were “mountain folk”. There are even rumors of Native ties and moonshining. The Native ties have been disproven, as the DNA doesn’t lie - and ya girl is HELLA northern European. So white. So very very white. The problem with dear old Billy is that he was born, most likely on the North Carolina and the future-Tennessee border. Tennessee didn't become a state until 1796, and North Carolina did not require vital records to be kept until 1913. The courthouse that would have stored his records burnt down in 1960, so we have limited state information for him, and have gone as far as we can with federal information. I have a theory that he was definitely born in North Carolina and came to Tennessee to volunteer for the War of 1812 in which he served as a teenager for about 6 months. I’d love to find out what Fort Loudon did with their records after the War of 1812, and maybe comb through those to see if I could find his parents listed. There is, after all, an entire county of North Carolina that is known to be the home of The Martins. According to my Ancestry DNA story, our family immigrated from either England, France or Germany to North Carolina, or that area at least. As it is, the family that I *can* trace from that line in the years following pretty much all stayed in one spot, McMinn County, Tennessee - where nearly all of them lived and died and contributed to the community…in their ways. More on the Martins in McMinn on another day. |
Family photo of John Martin (bottom left),
William's son
ca. late 19th century |
Who knows, maybe in this journey of documentation a person who knows more than I can point me in the right direction and officially solve the Martin mystery.
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