Martha Turner

Martha Turner was born in March 1832 in Wood County, then Virginia, the daughter of a John Turner about whom the record says nothing else.

On 28 August 1851 she married Thomas Bailey Fleming at Parkersburg. The county register has it in Book 1, page 66, the minister Francis Guthrie. She was nineteen.

Fifty acres and ten children

Three years into the marriage her husband bought fifty acres of his father’s farm on Burnt Cabin Slope, about ten miles west of West Union, and mortgaged three-quarters of the price straight back out of it. That hill farm is where the family was raised.

She bore twelve children, of whom nine were living in 1900 — her own answer to the census enumerator, and a better figure than any later reconstruction. Ten of the twelve are named across roughly twenty-two years — Robert Earl Wildermuth’s sketch names them, from Margaret in 1854 to Elizabeth in the 1870s — including James Wesley Fleming, Sadye’s father and Chuck’s maternal great-great-grandfather. Two of the ten were gone from the house by the 1880 census: Margaret married, and Cynthia away in St. Louis.

Still working at sixty-eight

By 1880 the household had moved off the Doddridge hill farm into the Parkersburg District of Wood County, with eight of the ten children at home.

The 1900 census is the last clear sight of her: Thomas at about seventy, Martha at sixty-eight, and their youngest son Floyd, renting a farm of 118 acres. Not owning it — renting, at that age.

She died 11 June 1904 in Wood County. The Wood County death register — Book #4, at the courthouse in Parkersburg — gives the cause as old age and the informant as F. T. Fleming, her son, almost certainly the Floyd who had been living with them. She was seventy-two.

(Robert Earl’s typescript says 11 June 1903. The register says 1904, and the register settles it.)

Her husband’s death was never recorded anywhere he could find, so she is the one of the pair with a date.

Two conflicts on the charts

The marriage date is now settled. The register gives 28 August 1851; one printed ancestor chart gives 18 August, but the 1998 pedigree chart gives 28 AUG 1851, agreeing with the register. The 18th was a slip.

Her birth county is not settled. This page says Wood County, following the earlier chart. The 1998 chart says Harrison County. Robert Earl’s own two sheets disagree, and no birth record has been found either way. Wood County is kept here — it is where she married in 1851 and where she died in 1904 — but it is a preference, not a proof, and the 1840/1850 censuses for both counties would settle it.

Sources: the 1851 marriage record, Wood County Record of Marriages Book 1 p. 66; the Thomas Bailey Fleming biographical sketch with its readings of the 1880 and 1900 censuses; and the printed ancestor charts, which supply her birth month, her death date, and her father’s name.