Barbara Ellen (nee Hussey) Martinez, a Chicago native who long resided on the North Side, died February 2, 2026, at age 90. Wife, mother, and grandmother, she was known for a soft touch and gentle bearing with anyone she met, whether working as a clerk in dime stores in Rogers Park or later as an administrative assistant in the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago Lake Shore Campus. Her Loyola work aligned with how she made faith a continuous practice, joined by her daily attendance at Mass in St. Jerome Church. Loyola also happened to be the school that acquired the old, National Register building of nearby Mundelein College, once an all-women's Catholic school that she had attended in earning a bachelor's degree in social work, a major that reflected her values for human dignity. As such, she fondly recounted how, during her honeymoon traveling though the Deep South in 1960, she drank from the water fountains labeled as colored only. It was while participating in a Young Catholic Workers, or Y.C.W., program in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood (headquartered at the Bernie Kelly Center) that she met her husband, who was a social worker and later a teacher, and they married at the nearby St. Andrew Church, where she had been baptized. They went on to have five children in a family that, like so many others, was built on a shoestring budget of several jobs and a prayer. They eventually had six grandchildren. She valued a family heritage that reached to County Galway, Ireland, which her ancestors left in the 1830s, settled in a frontier farm log cabin in Canada West, now Ontario, and then later moved to Minnesota's North Shore, in Grand Marais, where her grandfather and grandmother worked for a retired Civil War colonel of Gettysburg, who owned a vast homestead at Lake Superior, the area where her commercial artist and painter father was born. Her father later moved to Lakeview and began a family. When Barbara met her husband, it was a union of north meets south as her husband, Joseph Martinez, had been raised in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Barbara enjoyed learning the world's cultures and practiced Spanish daily and later went by 'Buelita (short for abuelita, or grandmother, in Spanish) to her grandchildren. She demonstrated a good memory and notetaking habit in her calendars to record the birthdays, anniversaries, and passing dates of family and friends. On those occasions, she marked the remembrance by sending greeting cards to family members, sometimes with a clipping from newspapers or magazines that she had read. She was fond of animals and volunteered at a local cat shelter. She is survived by five children: Michael (Fabiola), Mary, Mark (Jo Ellyn), Monica, and Maureen Veleta (Bernard). She is also survived by six grandchildren: Isabel Veleta, Alejo Taylor, Anne Marie Martinez, Alise Veleta, Catalina Martinez, and Luna Barbara Martinez. Her husband passed in 2012 after 52 years of marriage. Her only sibling, Peter T. Hussey Sr., passed in 1997. Internment was private, and a funeral Mass is being scheduled for summer 2026. Donations in her memory may be sent to Catholic Charities Chicago at https://www.catholiccharities.net/give, and please include Barbara's name in the donation's dedication. Or a contribution may be mailed with Barbara Martinez's name in the memo line to Catholic Charities Chicago, PO Box 7154, Carol Stream, IL 60197.

Services are private.  Memorial service planned in the future

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