Brief Life History of Martha
When Martha Weir was born about 1865, in California, United States, her father, Samuel Bell Weir, was 44 and her mother, Catharine Hopkins Faris, was 42. She died before 1870, in Kansas, United States.
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Parents and Siblings
Siblings (13)
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World Events (3)
1865
Abraham Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.
1865 · The Assassination of a President
While attending the play "Our American Cousin" in Ford's Theatre, actor John Wilkes Booth climbed up the stairs to the suite that President Abraham Lincoln and his wife resided. Once inside the suite Booth pulled out his pistol and shot The President in the head. In critical condition The President was carried out of the theatre for urgent medical attention. Unfortunately, Lincoln died the following day. Abraham Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated, and his death caused a period of national mourning both in the North and South.
1869 · Transcontinental Railroad Reaches San Francisco
The first transcontinental railroad reached San Francisco in 1869. The Western Pacific Railroad Company built the track from Oakland to Sacramento. The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California built the section from Sacramento to Promontory Summit Utah. The railroad linked isolated California to the rest of the country which had far-reaching effects on the social and economical development of the state.
Name Meaning
Scottish and English: topographic name for someone who lived by a dam or weir on a river, from Middle English, Older Scots wer(e) ‘weir; fish-trap’. Compare Ware and Wear . In northern England and lowland Scotland there has been much confusion with the Irish and Scottish Gaelic names in 2, 4 and 5 below.
Scottish: in Scotland, this surname was sometimes used for Gaelic Mac an Mhaoir ‘son of the steward’, more often Anglicized as McNair .
Scottish (of Norman origin): surname of a family of Blackwood (Lanarkshire), which is said to be descended from Ralph de Ver, a Norman baron associated with William the Lion between 1174 and 1184. The change in pronunciation from Vere to Were would be unusual in Anglo-Norman French, and the true source of the surname may lie elsewhere. One possibility is Wierre in Pas-de-Calais. Another possibility is that the surname may represent versions of the Norman surname de la Were ‘of the war’, a nickname for a warrior; see Warr .
Dictionary of American Family Names © Patrick Hanks 2003, 2006.
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