Deathdate: Unknown
Birthdate: on NOV 1843
“I’ve had to pull out a many a stitch that I’d sewed to suit her.”
Minnie Carrie Ann McDonnell Stewart (Hope and Dignity, 1983)
Martha was the daughter of Ruffin Stewart and either Elizabeth Bibby or Mary. Her father died in the mid-1850s and Mary died sometime before that. I am unsure as to when Elizabeth Bibby, her father’s first wife, passed.
The family resided in Person County, North Carolina at the time of her birth and lived in Macon County, North Carolina by the mid-1850s. After the death of her father, she was “bound out” to Reverend Canaro Drayton Smith and lived with his family. In 1861, she gave birth to her only daughter, Mary Jane Luvenia.