Payments to Confederate Widow to Resume

Alberta Martin, possibly the only living Confederate widow, learned this week that Alabama has agreed to renew her Confederate widow’s pension and a supplement, 64 years after she became ineligible for the aid because she remarried.

Martin, 89, who lives in a small house at the end of a dirt road, will get a monthly check of $335.

Martin was a 21-year-old widow with a young son in 1927 when she married 82-year-old William Jasper Martin, who had been a Confederate Army private.

He died at age 87 in 1932. Shortly afterward, she married again, making her ineligible for her late husband’s pension.

When the third husband--William Martin’s grandson--died in 1983, Alberta Martin became eligible for the pension again but didn’t know. “I’m going to buy me a hearing aid,” she said.