77. Martha Cain

Well, this entry might get some stray hits, from folks searching the surname "Cain"! Hi folks. Unless you're interested in a schoolgirl in 1810s North Carolina, you probably aren't going to find what you want below. --Ed.

A student named Martha Cain is in my list of students--she was at the school just one term, the second half of 1811. A William Cain made payments to the school in December 1811.

I know this is a repeated refrain in this project, but there were a lot of Cains in North Carolina in the 1810s--and a lot of them had daughters named Martha. A William Cain was born in Virginia in the 1670s, and seems to have been the patriarch of a very productive family for several generations--many families of nine or ten children in their tree. So this will be a matter of finding one born about 1800, for starters...

Aha! I've found a Martha Ann Cain born 22 June 1799 in Orange County, NC (near Chapel Hill), youngest daughter of William Cain Sr. (1743-1834) and Sarah Alston. (Her mother's surname Alston is attached to several Mordecai students--likely cousins to Martha.) That would make her the aunt of William Cain III--who married Sarah Jane Bailey (1828-1927), the daughter of Priscilla Brownrigg Bailey, another Mordecai alumna. This Martha Ann Cain's older sister Charity married Willie Person Mangum, a rather prominent North Carolinian with connections to many other Mordecai families. Assuming this is the same woman who attended the Mordecai school, she was about twelve when she was at Warrenton, briefly.

There's a PDF called "Families of Saint Mary's Episcopal Chapel, Orange County, North Carolina," that comments about this Martha Ann Cain that "she apparently did not marry." Was she buried under this name? I have a note in my dissertation appendix that she may have died in 1834, but I don't know where I got that tidbit.

There was another younger Martha Ann Cain (1825-1900), this woman's niece, who attended the Burwell School in Hillsborough.