John Ponsonby Martin (ca. 1765–1830), soldier, was the son of Lewis Burwell Martin, a member of Jamaica’s legislative assembly and later an assistant justice of its supreme court. The younger Martin was a lieutenant in the Loyal Cheshire Fencible Infantry in 1795, promoted two years later to captain-lieutenant. He came to the United States by 1821 to pursue claims related to his family’s prerevolutionary landholdings of some 7,750 acres of land in central Virginia, plus more than 200 slaves and other personal property, all of which had been sequestered by Virginia in 1778 and sold the following year. He died in Hanover County from a bilious fever (Lady’s Magazine 14 [1783]: 112; London Gazette, 12 Sept. 1795, 6 May 1797; DNA: RG 29, CS, Hanover Co., 1830; Richmond Enquirer, 28 Sept. 1830).

Martin’s uncle samuel martin was born in Virginia. Lewis Burwell Martin and Samuel Martin were the sons of John Martin, a representative of Caroline County in the House of Burgesses, 1730–34 and 1738–40. After their father’s death in 1761, Samuel Martin settled in Whitehaven, England. By 1784, the year after Lewis Burwell Martin’s death in Jamaica, Samuel Martin began to seek British compensation for family property seized by Virginia during the American Revolution (Leonard, General Assembly description begins Cynthia Miller Leonard, comp., The General Assembly of Virginia, July 30, 1619–January 11, 1978: A Bicentennial Register of Members, 1978 description ends , 74, 76; UkNA: American Loyalist Claims, A.O. 12/56). Samuel Martin died in 1800 without obtaining such a settlement, and by 1821 John Ponsonby Martin, the only remaining heir to the estate, took up the cause and presented a memorial late that year to the Virginia General Assembly seeking redress. He argued that he had a vested interest in the estate, which had been entailed to him in his grandfather’s will, and that because he had still been a minor when the property was confiscated, it should not have been sold. The Committee on Claims of the House of Delegates deemed his petition reasonable in February 1822, but no legislation resulted (John Wickham, “Case of John Ponsonby Martin” [undated MS in ViHi: Wickham Papers]; JHD description begins Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia description ends [1821–22 sess.], 61–2, 178, 182, 217 [19 Dec. 1821, 12, 13, 28 Feb. 1822).