Virginia Wheeler Martin’s $2.5M gift expands genealogy and history resources at Medina Library

It was, in many respects, a storybook life.

Virginia “Jinny” Wheeler Martin loved Medina, the village where she had grown up, as well as Medina County, which had been settled by her pioneer ancestors. But she also longed to see the world. And she succeeded — probably beyond her wildest dreams — first as Medina’s first airline attendant and then as the wife of a naval officer with assignments in Europe and throughout Asia.

Jinny made a point of returning to Medina every Memorial Day whenever possible to decorate the graves of her ancestors and to attend Memorial Day services. She died in 2016. In her will, she donated $2.5 million to the Medina County District Library to create an expanded genealogy and local history department.

Jinny was born in 1928 in Youngstown, but her parents moved back to Medina in 1930. As a senior at Medina High School in 1945, she made news when she volunteered to paint the names of military personnel serving in World War II on a building wall.

The American Legion had sponsored Medina’s “Roll of Honor,” a large white billboard created by painting over a brick wall on the corner of South Court and West Washington streets. The names of every young man in the Armed Forces and two female nurses from Medina and Montville Township were painted on it. A photo in the Medina County Gazette shows Jinny standing on a ladder, paintbrush in hand, adding a name.

Paintbrushes and art also played an important role in her life. She majored in art at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and, while working as a flight attendant for American Airlines in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she also pursued a master’s degree in art at the local university.

In 1954 she married a dashing naval aviator and career officer, Barney Martin, and they spent the first year of marriage in the Philippines and Japan.

Barney’s naval career moved onto an upward trajectory when he became an intelligence officer, and the Martins were assigned to Paris, where he served as assistant naval attaché at the American Embassy. The couple lived in the Paris suburb of St. Cloud and enjoyed several glamorous years of entertaining and being entertained by foreign attachés, as well as traveling throughout Europe.

In 1965 Barney, now Commander Martin, was assigned to the 6th Fleet as its intelligence officer, home ported in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur in France, and then Gaeta, Italy, which gave the couple the opportunity to travel throughout the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa. In Gaeta, the Martins rented a restored watchtower overlooking the Mediterranean that had been built in 1560.

In 1967 Captain Martin retired from the naval service. The couple moved to Rancho Santa Fe, California, to be near a Long Beach family business for which Barney served as CEO. There the Martins built their dream home, partly designed by Jinny, with panoramic views of the ocean and mountains.

In California, the focus of Jinny’s life became the San Diego Zoo. The Martins, who had no children, always had dogs in their lives, and Jinny’s affections grew to include wild animals.

She devoted much of her time and resources to the San Diego Zoological Society and the Wild Park Advisory Board. In fact, she became such an important supporter that the zoo would occasionally send some of its wild inhabitants to her home in cages so that they might be photographed with her for publicity.

Jinny died March 27, 2016, at the age of 88. She was buried in Mound Hill Cemetery in Seville, beside her husband, who had preceded her in death in 1996, two beloved dogs (Posey and Angel), and five generations of her mother’s family.

In addition to the $2.5 million she gave to the Medina Library, she also bequeathed about 140 boxes filled with genealogical magazines, family photos, yearbooks, written personal histories and personal mementos.

On Dec. 7, 2019, the Medina County District Library opened the new Virginia Wheeler Martin Family History and Learning Center to the public. The center added three new areas to the Medina Library.

The existing family and local history collection was greatly expanded with the creation of the new History Center. There is also a Digital Lab that makes it possible to convert home movies and slides, photographs, negatives and records to digital files. And finally, there is the popular Makerspace, which includes a 3D printer, large-format printer, laser engraver and an embroidery machine.