Martha Macomb Dinsmore
(1797 – 1859)
Martha Keturah Macomb (“Patty”) was born on September 9, 1797 in Georgetown, D.C., to Alexander and Jane Rucker Macomb. She was the fourteenth living child of Alexander, and the fifth of Jane, his second wife. James Dinsmore met Martha, age 31, while she was staying with a relative in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1828 and the couple was married at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Burlington, New Jersey on May 13, 1829. She and James had three daughters: Isabella Ramsay (1830), Julia Stockton (1833), and Susan Bell (1835). Because of her own background, Martha believed that girls should have a well-rounded education, not so different from how boys were educated. In Kentucky, Martha sometimes ventured to Cincinnati to visit friends, but more often stayed home or contented herself with visits to Silas Dinsmore and his wife, Mary Gordon, who lived a mile away. Over the years she welcomed many people to stay with her family, including a young friend from Philadelphia, Isabella Hill, who stayed for about forty years. Martha also gladly took in her niece, Susan Dinsmore Goodrich, who along with her brother, Benjamin F. Goodrich, was orphaned in 1849.
Heartbroken at her youngest daughter’s, Susan’s, death in 1851, Martha outlived her by only eight years. Julia later wrote about her mother, “Her prayer was granted: she did not wish to live till old age.” On August 17, 1859, seven days after the wedding of her eldest daughter, Isabella, she died of consumption (tuburculosis). She is buried next to her daughter, Susan, in the Dinsmore family graveyard.