Readers of the Gazette should know that there is a clear answer to the question “Martha, But Which One?” raised in your June 19 edition. Questions about the person for whom our Island was named were raised by J. Henry Lea and Fulmer Mead in George R. Stewart’s book, Names on the Land, quoted in 1945.

Several years later, Warner F. Gookin made a convincing case for her identity as Bartholomew and Mary Gosnold’s eldest daughter in his book on Bartholomew Gosnold, published in 1963. His evidence, not apparently available to earlier researchers, is from the parish records of St. James Church in Bury St. Edmunds, where her baptism is recorded as occurring on April 24, 1597.

Gookin identifies another Martha Gosnold, who was born in 1580. He suggests that she may have married Bartholomew’s brother Anthony not long before her death in 1598.

We do not know when Bartholomew’s daughter Martha died, but can assume that it was some time after 1602, after her father named the Island for her, and before the same Bury St. Edmund church register records the baptism of a second daughter named Martha born to Bartholomew and Mary Gosnold on February 5, 1607.

Thus, as suggested in the image of her in my ballad of Martha Gosnold, “She was not yet eight, but she could not wait to see her Vineyard land. T’was only the wave that was her grave did wash upon its sand.”

Jim Norton
Vineyard Haven