Martin McHenry Kenney, Confederate soldier, surveyor, lawyer, businessman, historian, and legislator, was born on December 11, 1831, beside the Mississippi River about fifteen miles above Rock Island, Illinois. He was the son of Maria (McHenry) and John Wesley Kenney. After the family home was destroyed in the Black Hawk War, the Kenneys returned to the region of Kentucky where they had resided before Martin's birth. In October 1833, fleeing a cholera epidemic, they moved to Texas. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he was elected captain of Company I of Col. George Washington Carter's Twenty-first Texas Cavalry. He saw action as part of Parsons's Texas Brigade, in Arkansas, and in the Red River campaign, in Louisiana, in the spring of 1864. After the war, he moved to Mexico, spent 1865 and 1866 in Tabasco and Yucatan, and then moved to Honduras, where he engaged in the mahogany export business. He moved on to South America in 1867 and traveled for seven years, principally in Argentina; he also visited the South Sea islands before returning to his mother's home in Texas in 1874. There he joined the Texas Rangers and served as quartermaster for the Frontier Battalion until 1875. On February 6, 1877, he married Annie Matthews of Chappell Hill; they had three children. The couple lived in Bellville for the next fourteen years. There Kenney returned to surveying and took up the practice of law. He was elected to the state legislature from Austin County in 1892 and served two terms. In July 1895 he was appointed Spanish translator in the General Land Office, a post he held with only a one-year break, in 1899-1900, until his death. [BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sidney S. Johnson, Texans Who Wore the Gray (Tyler, Texas, 1907). Charles W. Ramsdell, "Martin McHenry Kenney," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 10 (April 1907).Thomas W. Cutrer]