Martha Kelley

Martha Kelley was born 1844 in Barbour County, Virginia — the central-Virginia mountain county that would become West Virginia in 1863. Her father Johnson B. Kelley (b. 25 July 1810, Randolph County, Virginia) and her grandfather Ebenezer Kelley (b. 2 October 1763, Somerset County, New Jersey) place her family in the New-Jersey-to-Appalachian-Virginia migration that the late-18th-century Scotch-Irish-and-other-Ulster stream produced.

She married Seth Grosvenor Dunbar of Kennebec County, Maine in the late 1860s. Their daughter Verona Belle Dunbar was born 11 June 1869 in Wood County, West Virginia. Seth died 26 October 1870, sixteen months after Verona’s birth.

Martha was twenty-six and widowed with an infant daughter. Her line continued; the Kelley great-grandmother surname runs forward to Verona as a middle name carried through the rest of her life (“Verona Belle Kelley” in Robert Earl’s 1989 lineage chart).

The deeper Kelley line — back to County Wicklow

The GEDCOM carries the Kelley line through three more generations to John Patrick Kelley (b. 2 December 1725, Wicklow, County Wicklow, Ireland) — the Irish-born great-great-great-grandfather of Verona. Earlier still, John Aaron Kelley (b. 1702, Kildare, County Kildare, Ireland) sits as the deepest documented Kelley ancestor. The Kelley-Dunbar-Sheppard-Fleming chain that runs to Chuck through Sadye carries Irish, Maine-New England, and the broader Scotch-Irish Appalachian streams in one line.

Source: GEDCOM — Dale Eesley / FamilySearch, sync 1 June 2026.