The Family of
Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader
This family history website is devoted to sharing information about the family of Nathaniel Martin (1816-1905) and Hannah Strader (1829-1919). The site is maintained by Dave Smeds, a great-great-grandson of the couple. To read more about them, proceed to the matching pages containing their biographies and brief summaries of their ancestries. To examine the lineages of each of their fourteen children, click on the pertinent name.
Nathaniel and
Hannah’s Home (Martintown)
A Simplified List of
Descendants
Their Fourteen Children
Eleanor
Amelia “Nellie” Martin
What
you will and will not find here:
This website includes standard data such as names, birthdates, birthplaces, deathdates, marriages, offspring, burials, of Nathaniel and Hannah and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. This information is rendered in biographical format, as full paragraphs. If you’re looking for charts, family group sheets, systematic listings of sources, etc., as is common on genealogical websites, my apologies. I don’t favor the raw and dry approach, and I prefer not to slavishly refer to public documents because to do so sometimes requires propagating the mistakes found in those sources. The pages are devoted to people, not to statistics. I hope you will find this approach refreshing and more interesting than the run-of-the-mill family history site.
The list of Nathaniel and Hannah’s children shown here is complete at fourteen. The list of grandchildren is believed to be complete at thirty (counting a set of twins who died at birth or soon after, but not counting a known miscarriage). Sixty great-grandchildren are listed. This number is also believed to be complete (omitting a fetus who died in the womb when its mother perished in the great flu epidemic of 1918.) Both thirty and sixty may seem impossibly low given that there were fourteen children, but six of Nathaniel and Hannah’s offspring died very young, son Abraham Lincoln Martin died at age eighteen before starting a family, and daughter Juliette Martin never had children despite her long life. This leaves six, not fourteen, primary lines of descent.
Nathaniel and Hannah and all of the first three generations of their descendants have individual biographical pages on this site, with the exception of four descendants lost so early in life that they either never had names, or their names have been completely lost. (You will find these four in their positions in the simplified chart, but any biographical detail will only be found on the page devoted to their parent.) If you find a page that seems incomplete and you can provide material to address that lack, you will be accommodated. Be aware that at this time, a small fraction of the pages are still not as complete as intended. As for great-great-grandchildren and their progeny, you will not find them delineated here. Most of those individuals are still alive and I don’t want to broadcast their personal stats over the web. However, I maintain an extensive archive that includes all descendants I have been able to identify, and I am able to share some information about them as long as the results remain closely held and the sharing doesn’t violate any privacy promises I’ve made to given individuals. At present, the archive contains the names of 108 great-great-grandchildren, 175 of their children, 141 of the next generation, and 17 of the youngest level. If you want to know more, email me, Dave Smeds, at the address below. (I haven’t created a link. You’ll have to enter the address manually into your email client. Furthermore I’ve distorted the address so as to thwart spammers’ webcrawling address harvesters. Sorry, but I used to get a lot of unsolicited email and I’m still cautious. I think you’ll find it legible.)
Regarding photos: If possible, each page contains a photo. Sometimes a page will have quite a few photos. This really helps liven up the website, and is much more compelling than plain text. You are free to download these jpgs. However, be aware that they are relatively low-resolution, small file-size versions of scans made from original photographs. I am happy to provide versions at high resolution suitable for top-quality print-outs, and sometimes I can supply additional images of the person or persons you are interested in, above and beyond the ones I have posted. I would love to have been able to simply upload all photos in their highest quality form, but that make the pages slow to load and take up too much server space. And speaking of photos, I’d love to receive more. I have had very good luck collecting key photos of the clan. At this time, all 104 members of the first three generations of descendants are represented by at least one image with the exception of Robert Earle Martin and certain descendants who died at less than four years of age -- and in a number of the latter cases, I do have images of their gravemarkers. However, some pages could really use better views. A special thanks to Bert Warner, Patty Eells, JoAnn Carpenter, and Tammy Glendenning for providing the bulk of what is available here already, with nods to Jerry Hastings, Vaughan Smith, Jon Siegmeier, Dick Boos, Janis Hyde, Jodi Mulliniks, Morgan Nash, Jeff Krum, Cindy Durns, and Laura Desmul for filling in gaps.
Though the list of identified descendants has now exceeded five hundred and probably contains all descendants born through 1960, not all of those born in the past half-century or so are known to me. There may be dozens -- conceivably as many as a hundred -- whose names have yet to be added to the master archive. If you can supply information and/or corrections, please contact me.
Assembling this trove of family lore took a great deal of effort. Some of this is my own work, but I could not have succeeded to this degree without the help of others. The first person to give me a start on this project, all the way back in 1974 when I was nineteen, was my grandfather Bert Warner, a grandson of Nathaniel and Hannah through Nellie. “Pop” -- as we grandchildren called him -- was responsible for preserving key photographs as well as passing along a basic record of Nathaniel and Hannah’s family compiled by his sister Emma Hastings, who was in turn aided in the late 1940s by Juliette Martin Savage, at that time the last surviving child of Nathaniel and Hannah. In more recent times my first major bonanza of genealogical information came from the work done by Howard Frame, a great-grandson of Hannah’s sister Elizabeth Strader Frame. A large clump of Howard’s papers were loaned to me for nearly a year by his son Gary Frame. I would also like to acknowledge the labors of the late Mildred Yeazel (1918-1980), a genealogist who helped Howard Frame in the 1960s -- Mildred was able to visit Martintown as Howard was not, and found many of the court records and deeds associated with Nathaniel and Hannah and their parents and grandparents, not only in Green County, WI but in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Mildred believed her husband might be related on the Strader side. This was something she was never able to prove but it spurred her on. I am happy to say she was correct. Her husband was a descendant of a second cousin of Hannah Strader. Howard’s work also benefitted significantly from the short histories of the Strader, Starr, and Frame families composed by Mary Rachel Frame Johanning Webb (a daughter of Hannah’s sister Anna Catherine Strader), who wrote these brief but essential essays some time between 1918 and 1922 at the request of her niece Anna Laurie Frame Walker. Over the years, I have also enjoyed the help and comments of Vaughan Smith of Australia, a great-great-grandson of Nathaniel and Hannah through Horatio. I have been substantially helped from the summer of 2006 onward by JoAnn Carpenter, the wife of a great great grandson of Nathaniel and Hannah through Jennie Edith Martin. JoAnn’s meticulous investigation began in the 1980s; it has been abetted by the work of her daughter, Denise Carpenter Macy. Both JoAnn and Denise drew upon and continue to draw upon the extensive genealogical notes left by Nathaniel and Hannah’s great-granddaughter Sarah Jeanette Hodge. It was Sarah’s queries in the 1940s that spurred the initial genealogical exchange-of-notes within the Martin/Strader descendants, an effort which drew the active participation of Emma Hastings, Juliette Savage, Lulu Fay Brown Seay, and Cora Belle Warner Spece. In the spring of 2007, Tammy Glendenning, a great great great granddaughter of Nathaniel and Hannah through Mary Lincoln “Tinty” Martin, helped to fill in my knowledge of Tinty’s descendants, and has continued to be a resource. I owe an overwhelming debt to my second cousin Patty Eells of Martintown, like me a descendant of Nellie Martin. Patty first helped me in 2005 and over the years has forwarded tremendous amounts of memorabilia originally gathered by her grandmother Emma Warner Hastings, including a fabulous collection of hundreds of Green County and Stephenson County newspaper articles from the 1910s on up to the 1960s. In the latter half of 2008, Janis Hyde, a descendant of Emma Ann Martin, helped to gather info and provide photographs about the Arkansas-and-Texas branch of Emma’s line, which ideally supplements the material that comes via Jerry Hastings of Winslow about the Winslow/Martintown branch of Emma’s line. A nod goes to Elvira Downs Nicosia, who in 1974 compiled a magnificent genealogy of the family of her grandfather, Green County pioneer William S. Spece. Three granddaughters of Nathaniel and Hannah married grandsons of William S. Spece (these grandsons were all first cousins of Elvira), and therefore the book contains a trove of information about a significant portion of the Martin/Strader clan. And finally, thank you to the many cousins who gave me specific answers to questions about themselves and their immediate kin.