Whilst Christopher "Christie" Martin was raised from about three years of age in Scotland, his football education being entirely Scots, he was not eligible for its national team. In 1911, aged 10, so probably born in 1901, and living in Clydebank he was the third child of seven of Patrick, a shipyard labourer, and Kate Martin with all his younger siblings reported as born there or in Glasgow and he and all his elder ones in Ireland. And from Irish records comes confirmation that he was indeed born in 1901, by Athlone in West Meath and further from the 1921 Scottish census, where he is recorded as Chris, living by then in Partick and working as a rivet-heater again in a shipyard, that it was in fact in neighbouring Co. Roscommon. 

It would be again in Partick that in 1923 Christie Martin would marry the girl next-door, Mary Kate Milmoe. Two children, Christopher and Catherine, were then born in 1927 and 1929, still in Partick, as Christie's football flourished, domestically, albeit on the other side of the country to Glasgow, and internationally. In 1925 he had been called up by the Belfast-based Irish FA for a single cap and against Scotland, a 0-3 defeat at Windsor Park. In 1927 it was the turn of the Dublin-based Football Association of Ireland again for one appearance, again in defeat, 1-2 at Lansdowne Rd. In the former he was in his normal position out on the right wing but with the genius of the equally Hiberno-Scots Patsy Gallagher inside him. In the latter he was at centre-forward.