Four families, three worlds, one prairie district. Long before Violet Martin was born on a homestead near Ituna, Saskatchewan, in 1915, her ancestors were small farmers in a County Down townland beside Warrenpoint (Samuel and Sarah Martin), a Killinchy family tied to a soldier’s pension record, McBurneys from the linen towns of Banbridge and Gilford (William John and Margaret McBurney), and Cowans and Brydens from the Scottish Borders.
Three of those streams ran through County Down and one came across the North Channel. They met in Belfast, where John Frederick Martin was driving a tram in 1901. In 1904 he married Jennie McBurney and they sailed for Canada. Within two years they were homesteading on the Saskatchewan prairie.
Listen to the full story below, or trace the four streams on the map.
A note on the sources: the Martin and McBurney lines are well documented from the 1800s on, but further back some links rest on a single record, and a few relationships are still probable rather than proven. Where that is so, the story says so. The page also does not claim an occupation where none has been found. This family lived inside a flax and linen economy, but no record yet shows who grew flax or who worked in a mill.
