Emory Asbury Martin's Account Book

Some years ago, I stopped in Spartanburg S.C. for a short visit with Mildred Howard, my cousin and daughter of my uncle John Martin. Our conversation had turned to family and I was telling her how little I knew about my Martin relatives. I had been in my father's "second" family. With my half-siblings a generation older and my father's early death, I'd somehow missed getting to know much about life and times on the Martin homestead in North Carolina's Northampton County. Mildred gave me an understanding smile. She told me there was a Martin keepsake in her possession that she would like for me to have. I waited in bewilderment until she returned in a few minutes with a flat brown object about the size of an envelope.

I never met my paternal grandparents, Emory Asbury and Rosa Sumner Martin. Nor to the best of my memory, did I ever visit the land originally conveyed to our family by a land grant from the King of England. It was the land where they lived, where they worked, and where they raised their family. I knew six of the children survived, married and had children of their own. I had heard that there were others that died in infancy or in childhood and that one had met a tragic death as a young man. Those stories became grounded as I took the small brown book in my hands and turned the pages. Here were indentures of account with tradesmen and sharecroppers, entries denoting the birth and occasionally the death of children, and the idle scribbling of a man writing in a book where for many years he documented his life's transactions. Here were the life and times of my father's family.

With today's technology, family treasures such as this don't need to wait in a drawer for the right opportunity to be passed along and known only to a few. It can be experienced through it's digital image by anyone interested. While these images are suitable for web perusal, they are better viewed by downloading the higher resolution version in the EA Martin Account Book zip file.