My second great-grandmother, Martha Ann Chadwick, known to her family as “Puss,” was born on 3 November 1865, in Currituck County, North Carolina.
I still don’t know where the nickname “Puss” came from.Â
What I do know is that Martha experienced an extraordinary amount of loss while she was still very young.
                      Photo Courtesy of Spence/Wescott family
Growing Up in Currituck County
Martha was the daughter of William Davenport Chadwick and Lurana J. O’Neal. Lurana had previously been married to Nathan Etheridge, with whom she had four children before his death in 1856.
William and Lurana’s family included Martha’s older siblings Maria, Luvina, Rebecca, and John. Her brother Edgar was born when Martha was about three, followed several years later by her younger sister Lillie Dane.
The family lived at Poplar Branch in Currituck County, a coastal North Carolina community not far from the Outer Banks.
Martha was born during the final year of the Civil War. Although the fighting was drawing to a close by the time of her birth, northeastern North Carolina had already experienced considerable disruption during the conflict. Union forces captured nearby Roanoke Island in February 1862, and military operations extended into Currituck Sound later that month.
Martha’s childhood would instead be marked by losses much closer to home.
Five Deaths Before She Was Seventeen
Martha’s little sister Lillie Dane died when Martha was about seven years old, only a few months after Lillie’s birth.
Then came one loss after another.
Her older sister Rebecca died when Martha was thirteen.
About a year later, her mother, Lurana, died at only fifty years old.
The following year, Martha’s half-sister Arissia died.
Seven months later, Martha lost her father, William, who was only forty-eight.
Five members of her immediate family were gone before Martha reached seventeen.
When I first wrote about her years ago, I followed that list with the thought that perhaps all that loss explained why she accepted John Thomas Wescott’s marriage proposal at eighteen.
I wouldn’t make that assumption today.
The records can tell me that Martha experienced tremendous loss. They cannot tell me how she felt about it, or why she chose to marry John.
That’s Martha’s story to keep.
John Thomas Wescott
On 12 March 1884, eighteen-year-old Martha married John Thomas Wescott, who was thirty.
John had been married before. His first wife, Lovey Payne, had died, leaving him with a young daughter, Dora.
Martha therefore became a wife and stepmother at eighteen. By nineteen, she and John had begun having children of their own.
Together, Martha and John had five children.
Their marriage also connected two families already living and working in the same small corner of coastal North Carolina.
An 1884 edition of Branson’s North Carolina Business Directory provides an intriguing clue about how their families may have known one another. The directory lists a Wescott as proprietor of the Wescott Hotel on Roanoke Island and Martha’s father, W. D. Chaddic, as a lawyer in Manteo and proprietor of the Manteo Hotel.
I once wondered whether those business connections were how Martha and John met.
They may have been.
But I haven’t found evidence proving it.
And after enough years doing genealogy, I’ve learned to appreciate the difference between a good possibility and a documented fact.
Life With a Lifesaver
John’s career eventually took the family into the world of the United States Life-Saving Service.
In 1887, he was appointed keeper of the Poyner’s Hill Life-Saving Station. During his years in the service, he and his crews responded to vessels in distress along a stretch of the North Carolina coast where storms, shoals, and shipwrecks were part of life. My research into John’s career has documented rescues involving more than twenty-five people.
Those records tell us a great deal about John.
They say considerably less about Martha.
That is a familiar problem when researching women of her generation.
John’s occupation generated government records, newspaper coverage, and official reports. Martha’s work was largely performed within the family and household, where far less of it reached paper.
But she was there.
She raised five children of her own and helped raise John’s daughter Dora. She moved with the family as John’s work changed. And she remained beside him through a marriage that lasted half a century.
Fifty Years Together
In 1934, Martha and John celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.
Fifty years had passed since the eighteen-year-old Martha Chadwick married the thirty-year-old widower with a young daughter.
By then, the family had grown considerably.
Martha had lived long enough to see her children become adults and to know grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
The newspaper account of their golden anniversary is one of my favorite records from their lives because it captures something vital records cannot.
It marks time shared.
Birth certificates tell us when people arrived. Death certificates tell us when they left.
Every once in a while, we’re lucky enough to find something that tells us a little about the life lived in between.
Martha’s Final Years
Martha died at age seventy. Her death certificate gives the cause as chronic nephritis, a term historically used for chronic inflammation or disease of the kidneys.
She was buried beside John in the Wescott family plot at Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, North Carolina.
When I first wrote about Martha, I concentrated heavily on the tragedies of her childhood and the possible connections surrounding her ancestry.
Looking at her life again years later, I see something different.
Martha lost five close family members before she was seventeen.
Then she spent the next half-century building another family.
I can’t know how those early losses affected her. The records don’t tell me.
But they do allow me to follow a girl called Puss from Poplar Branch, through marriage and motherhood, into a family whose descendants are still telling her story nearly a century later.
And for now, that’s enough.
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