Jacinta Marto was seven when the apparitions began and nine when she died, which makes her the youngest person the Catholic Church has canonised who was not killed for the faith.
1917
She was the youngest of the three cousins at the Cova da Iria and, by the account, both saw and heard. What is reported of her afterwards is dominated by one thing: the vision of hell described in the first of the three so-called secrets, which she is said to have taken harder than the other two did and to have returned to constantly.
Under pressure
In August 1917 the district administrator removed the three children from their homes and held them, and by their account threatened them. She was seven years old and did not retract. Witnesses hostile to the apparitions agree that the children's account did not change.
Illness
She caught influenza in the autumn of 1918 and never recovered. The infection became a purulent pleurisy, she was taken to Lisbon and operated on, and she died there on 20 February 1920. She was in hospital away from her family at the end, which the devotional literature dwells on at length and which is also simply what happened to a child with an infection of that kind in 1920.
What survives of her
Almost nothing in her own words. She could not write. Everything attributed to her comes through Lucia dos Santos, her cousin, who outlived her by eighty-five years, and through the people who questioned her in her last illness. The atlas records that limitation rather than working around it.