52 Ancestors 2026 Week 30 - Free Space
Mary Martin (c.1730–1805): A Life Almost Lost to the Margins I used a random number selector to choose this week’s ancestor, and up popped #481 — Mary Martin , my maternal 6× great‑grandmother. I knew almost nothing about her yesterday. Today, I know just enough to realise how much of her life sits in the quiet spaces between records. A Birth We Can’t Quite Catch If we go by her marriage licence, Mary was born around 1730 , and she was “of East Wittering.” That phrase — of a parish — is slippery. It doesn’t guarantee birth there; it simply means she was living there long enough to satisfy the licence requirement. My search of the Sussex Family History Group’s baptisms for Mary Martin between 1720 and 1750 returned no East Wittering entries at all . Instead, the surname appears scattered across Sussex — Battle, Hamsey, East Grinstead, Clapham, Cuckfield, Henfield, Bolney, Icklesham, Lewes, Framfield, and so on. Not a single match in the coastal parishes where she later lived. This a...
