Vital Stats
Samuel — Born
before February 1850, County Down, Ireland
Samuel — Died
September 25, 1889, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sarah — Born
about 1855, County Down, Ireland
Sarah — Died
not established
Married
February 7, 1871
Children
11
Samuel and Sarah Martin were Fred Martin's parents, and everything the family knows about Fred's Irish beginnings runs through them. They were Presbyterian farming people on the shore of Carlingford Lough, at the foot of the Mourne Mountains. They married in a small meetinghouse in the hills in the winter of 1871, raised a large family on a few acres, and then Samuel went to America and died in Pittsburgh in the autumn of 1889, leaving Sarah with the younger children and the farm. Sarah stayed. She was still farming at Ballydesland in 1911, a widow for twenty-two years, with a grandson in the house. Meanwhile her sons went west across the Atlantic, to Toronto and Ituna.
The story starts one generation back, with Samuel's father. John Martin was a farmer at Ballydesland, a widower when he died there on 9 October 1870 at the age of 84, which puts his birth about 1785 or 1786, in the years before the Act of Union. His son Samuel was with him when he died and registered the death. The entry appears to give the cause as about two weeks of diarrhoea.
Three weeks later a Belfast court gave Samuel the right to handle John's estate, which was under one hundred pounds. The record calls Samuel "a Son and one of the next of kin". That wording means John left no will, and it leaves room for other children or other relatives. It does not say that Samuel inherited the farm, and it is wrong to say he did. What it does tell us is that Samuel was the son on the spot, and that a young man who had just buried his father was married four months later.
Sarah Martin came from Moneygore, a townland in the hills north of Warrenpoint. Her father was also a John Martin. The marriage record says so, and it also says she was a spinster and a minor, meaning under twenty-one, in February 1871. Her two census returns, thirty years apart, give her birth as about 1855 or 1856. Her maiden name was Martin, the same as her husband's, which is why the name needs care. Martin is one of the commonest names in Ulster, and the Martins of Moneygore and the Martins of Ballydesland were not the same people.
There were at least two John Martins holding land at Moneygore in the 1850s. They were told apart by nicknames, "bonny" and "big", and each held eight or nine acres. Sarah's father was one of them, and we don't know which.
Samuel and Sarah were married on 7 February 1871 in the Clonduff Presbyterian Meetinghouse at Ballynagappoge, by licence, according to the form and discipline of the Presbyterian Church. The building had gone up in 1842 and stood about a mile and a half from Sarah's home, so they married at her church, not his. Samuel is down as a bachelor and a farmer living at Ballydesland, of "full" age, which means at least twenty-one. Sarah has no occupation written against her name. Two witnesses signed, and one of them may be a Margaret Martin, a relative of the bride or groom, though the handwriting is hard to read.
Ballydesland is a small townland of about 300 acres in Clonallan parish, a couple of miles north of Warrenpoint on Carlingford Lough. The Martins were farmers there, and farmers of the modest kind. The surviving records call John and Samuel farmers, never gentlemen or landowners, and the Martin holdings nearby in the valuation of the 1850s ran to eight or nine acres. A directory of 1886 lists a Samuel Martin at Ballydesland among the local farmers.
The family was Presbyterian, literate, and English speaking. The district was mixed farming with cattle and linen yarn, and Warrenpoint, a small port and summer resort, was the nearest town. Belfast was about forty miles away.
Their children came steadily for nearly twenty years. Mary Jane was born on 27 August 1872, and her birth entry names her father as Samuel Martin of Warrenpoint and her mother as Sarah. Fred, John Frederick, came about 1875 or 1876. After him came Elizabeth, Robert about 1878, James Wilson about 1880, Jesse about 1881 or 1882, William about 1883, then Isaac, Margaret about 1886 or 1887, and Samuel, the youngest, born about 1888 or 1889, just before his father died.
That is ten or eleven children, and the list comes from several kinds of evidence. Mary Jane is on her birth entry. Robert, William, Margaret and Samuel are in their mother's households in 1901 and 1911. James Wilson's parents, Samuel and Sarah, are named on his 1911 marriage in Toronto. Fred and Jesse are the brothers of the Saskatchewan homestead.
On 25 September 1889 Samuel Martin, "late of Ballydessland, County Down, farmer," died at "Pittsburg U.S.A." That is the whole of what we know, and it comes from an Irish court calendar. The letters of administration were not granted until 14 September 1896, seven years later, to Sarah, "the Widow," on an estate of 210 pounds.
Everything else is a question. We do not know why Samuel was in Pittsburgh, whether he went for work, to visit, or to settle, how long he had been there, or what he died of. We do not know where he is buried.
Sarah did not leave Ballydesland. In 1901 she was 45, a widow and a farmer able to read and write, with four children at home: Robert, 22, William, 17, Maggie, 15, and Samuel, 12. Ten years later she was 56 and the head of the household, still a widow and a farmer, with her daughter Margaret, 22, her son Samuel, 20, and a grandson, Frederick George, age one.
The census says farmer, which tells us what she did and not whether she owned the land. Who held the farm after John, and after Samuel, is one of the open questions. The record of her own death has not been found.
Fred was the first of the brothers we can follow out of Ireland. By 1901 he was a tram driver in Belfast. In 1904 he married Jennie McBurney and sailed from Londonderry, and after two years in Toronto he took a homestead at File Hills, near Ituna, Saskatchewan. His brother Jesse took the next holding on the same section. Fred died there on 19 June 1915, at about 40. You can read his story on his own page.
James Wilson Martin was in Toronto in February 1911 when he married Mary Hynds, a tailor's daughter. He was about thirty, a fireman, a bachelor and a Presbyterian. His marriage record names his father as Samuel Martin, a farmer, and his mother as Sarah Martin. One of the witnesses signed as Wm B. Martin, 371 King Street, which looks very much like William Beers Martin, the brother who later had a family at Ituna.
William is the third. A William Martin of 17 is in Sarah's house in 1901. A William Beers Martin, born about 1883, was farming at Ituna by 1915 with his wife Rachel Hill, and he lived until 1981.
Most family pages start with a birth and end with a grave. Samuel's birth: "full age" on his marriage means he was born no later than February 1850. No baptism has been found for him, and his age at death is not recorded anywhere we have looked.
Sarah's birth and parents. Her birth was about 1855, probably at Clonduff Presbyterian, whose baptism registers survive from 1842. Her mother is not named anywhere, and her father is one of two John Martins of Moneygore.
Why Samuel went to Pittsburgh, and where he is buried, is unknown, as is Sarah's death, and what became of the farm. No death record, will or land record has been found for her after the 1911 census.
A reader used to English or Canadian records may wonder why a family this size leaves so little. It is the records that are missing. The Irish census returns for 1821 to 1851 were mostly burned in the fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922. The returns for 1861 and 1871 were destroyed on purpose in 1877, and those for 1881 and 1891 were pulped during the First World War. Only 1901 and 1911 survive in full, which is why Sarah appears in two households and in no others.
This family does have better luck than some. Presbyterian registers were kept locally, so the Clonduff baptisms and marriages survived, and civil registration of births and deaths from 1864 and of non-Catholic marriages from 1845 means most of the gaps here may be records lost, not a family that left none.