Genealogical Records
Abstract
This little booklet is an extension of the Martin portion of a book that I self-published in late 2014 entitled The Pioneer Williams Families of Smith Township, Posey County, Indiana and their Allen, Cater, Davis, Harmon, Johnson/Johnston, Journey, Lowe, Martin, Prewitt/Pruitt and Rook Connections.1 It contains by far the most detailed published account of Elder James Martin’s life and family. This new work has been created to document additional facts and sources related to the lives of Elder James Martin and his brother Simon.
Elder James Martin is very unique among people of his era, in that he left a very detailed record of his life in various public records: militia lists, land records, marriage returns, court cases, elections, Census records, tax rolls, etc. These details allow his whereabouts in five states/colonies and ten different jurisdictions to be recorded in considerable detail. In this work and the earlier Williams book, it is possible to find record of him in the following years and locations (probably less than a third of these records had been documented by published researchers prior to the Williams book):
Disciplines
Genealogy | United States History
Recommended Citation
Malone, Steve and Folklife Archives, Manuscripts &, "Elder James Martin and his brother Simon Martin" (2019). Genealogical Records. Paper 143.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_genealogical_rec/143
Comments
Notes
Elder James Martin was a pioneer preacher associated with Alexander Devin. He only stopped briefly in Warren County, from about 1805 to 1811 or so, before moving on to Indiana Territory.
This little booklet is dedicated to the many self-proclaimed genealogists out there who haven’t done the work to warrant such a title. One such individual has been the sole motivation behind writing this story and, once and for all, sinking the Colonel James Martin myth.
DISCLAIMER I have no known Martin ancestry. My interest in Elder James Martin stems from a book that I published in 2014, as two of his children had married children of my fourth great-grandfather, Simon Williams. My interest in his brother Simon Martin stems from my belief, developed five-plus years ago, that he was the key to proving beyond any doubt that the pioneer preacher James Martin of Vanderburgh County, Indiana was not directly related to Colonel James Martin of Edgefield District, South Carolina. That belief has been thoroughly proven in this paper.