Fredericka Martin Papers

Fredericka Martin was a Spanish Civil War nurse, writer, and historian. She was born in Cooperstown, New York on June 2, 1905. Following high school, she lived and worked with the St. Margaret Episcopalian Order of Nuns in Jersey City, New Jersey, and in 1925 attended the affiliated nursing school of Christ Hospital. In 1929, Martin married Alexander Cohen. During the early 1930s Martin became an active member in the nurses union, attended political science classes at the Labor Temple in New York City, and began developing her aptitude for foreign languages learning Russian and Yiddish. On January 16, 1937 Martin embarked on the S.S. Parisas part of the first American medical unit to Spain. Martin's union with Cohen ended in divorce in the late 1930s and she married Dr. Samuel Berenberg in 1940. In 1941, Berenberg took a medical assignment on the Pribilof Islands 300 miles off the coast of Alaska in the Bering Sea. With Martin's help, Berenberg managed the Fish and Wildlife Hospital on St. Paul Island. Martin's work brought her into contact with the indigenous Aleut sealing community, non-citizen wards of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Martin spent the next 10 years of her life advocating on behalf of the community. She came to be regarded as an expert on the Aleut, producing a series of articles, books, editing an Aleut language dictionary, and translating numerous manuscripts and articles. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Martin and Berenberg returned to Greenbelt with their newborn daughter Tobyanne. Following the dissolution of their marriage, Martin moved with the 9-year-old Tobyanne in 1950 to Cuernavaca, Mexico. A cultural outpost for Spanish exiles and American expatriates, Cuernavaca proved to be a congenial home for Martin. For the net 40 years she supported herself as a translator, a travel book writer, and an instructor at a Spanish language institute, working with her former Medical Bureau colleague and fellow expatiate Lini (Fuhr) de Vries. In the late 1930s Martin began to write a history on the Medical Bureau volunteers. This ambitious task would occupy her for the remainder of her life. Although Martin produced abundant notes and drafted several chapters, struggles with money, poor clerical assistance, and failing health hampered her in her efforts to complete her Medical Bureau history. By 1982 her attention turned from her writing project to finding a suitable repository to administer the materials she has so assiduously collected and maintained in her Cuernavaca cottage. In 1986, in recognition for her contributions to the Aleut, Martin was made an honorary lifetime citizen of St. Paul Island, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Alaska. On October 4, 1992 Fredericka Martin died in Cuernavaca. She was 87 years old.