This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

Martha Dyer.
73
home of her widowed sister, Jane Coleman. Here she soon learned to love the only child in the home?Martha Coleman, her namesake?almost as well as if her own. She often said that her sense of loneliness in life would have been relieved, her griefs lessened, and her declining years brighter, had she been blessed with children of her own. Here the three lived happily together for five or six years, when Mrs. Coleman married and moved away, again leaving Martha Shofner broken up and without a home.
The doors of her brother Lot mi?s house were the third time opened to her; and she again accepted and resided there a number of years, with the exception of a year or two spent in Shelbyville in the meantime.
At an early age she joined the church of her fathers, the Lutheran, and lived a consistent and helpful member; but after her marriage to Mr. Dyer, she placed her membership in his church, the Missionary Baptist, and remained with that church until a few years before her death, when she returned to the Lutheran. Just a few years before her death she moved to Hover, Tenn., to the home of Mr. J. W. Hester, who had married her sister, Mrs. Coleman, to again be welcomed into the family of her sister and niece.
On August 8, 18!)!), at the age of seventy years, God calk'd her home. She was both fortunate and unfortunate in life?fortunate, after having been bereaved so many times, to find kind hearts and homes to receive her, so she would not have to cast her lot among strangers?a thing she very much disliked, for the love of blood and family was strong within her.