Was it Hattie or Harriet?

Harriet Dora Peterson Johnston

September 8, 1861 - February 17, 1945

Harriet Dora Peterson Johnston is my great grandmother, mother of Leroy Richley Johnston and my Dad's paternal grandmother. She was born in Seneca County, New York, in 1861, and moved with her family to Illinois in her teen years. In Illinois she married Charles Henry Johnston, a young man with roots in Vermont, and together they had eleven children, nine of who lived to adulthood. Leroy Richley, my Grandpa, was the seventh child of their eleven.

I've learned recently that Harriet was known as Hattie. It was on a trip to Illinois with Merle and my parents in 2005 that I learned that my Dad grew up next door to his grandmother Hattie, and that she was a very nice grandmother. It was standing in front of my Dad's childhood home in Lockport that Dad shared this with me, pointing to her house - the identical twin of the house his parents had built, standing side-by-side. That was so strange, as I had never heard her mentioned as I was growing up.

I later asked Aunt Ruth about her Grandma Hattie Johnston. She beamed and told me about what a special relationship they had. She said that when she was sent to her room, Grandma Hattie would go upstairs to the bedroom facing the younger Johnston's house so she and Ruth could wave and talk through their open windows. She said she and her brothers were always in and out their Grandma's house. She said that Grandma Hattie spent many winters in Port Arthur and stayed in the sun room, the room that I knew only as the special room where the old German organ that I now have stood. She pointed to one green glass bowl in her china cabinet, saying that this bowl h ad been Grandma Johnston's.

I learned that Grandma Hattie's two youngest children, Dorothy and Earl (know better as Brownie) lived with her, and that Brownie, who was a baseball player on the caliber of today's major league players, was my Dad's favorite uncle. I also learned that Brownie committed suicide in that house just two days before Mom and Dad were married in Port Arthur; that was three years before his mother passed away. The story was that he suffered from terrible headaches and had reached the end of his headache tolerance, and that Grandma Hattie found him.

You can imagine how curious I am about Grandma Hattie. Thus I began to search for clues about her via Ancestry research and contact with Johnston cousins. I learned that Hattie, like my other great grandmothers, married young, had more than a houseful of children, experienced the loss of several children during her lifetime, and lived many years as a widow. The second of her eleven children, George Frederick, died at a young age from tuberculosis. Her first daughter, Julia, died when she was only two. And her next son, Charles Henry Jr., died a tragic death as a young man - killed on the stoop of his home in Chicago, either as a suicide or a "hit" associated with her role as a union leader (the stories vary). Another girl, Enith, lived less than a year, and then there was Brownie, who committed suicide in the basement of their home. As a tiny woman who birthed eleven children and saw four of them die, she must have been a giant of strength and perseverance.

As I dug into her family's history I was surprised to find that her family line was the one that connected our family to the beginning days of Europeans in North American and the revolutionary war. On both her mother's and father's sides, family was in North American from the middle 17th century, and of course, the men who were young enough to fight during the revolutionary war were patriots, serving in militias in New Jersey, New York or Pennsylvania. I was told as a young girl that I would be eligible for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution and that we were related by marriage to John Quincy Adams. I have not been able to document that connection,but I have discovered many revolutionary war patriots in Hattie's family. My application to the DAR has just been approved.

So this side of our family were the first of our relatives to come from Europe to North America - but where did they come from! My Grandma Johnston always said the he was part Scotch-Irish and part bulldog. My Grandma Johnston was pure German as were my maternal grandparents. So I was was surprised that bulldog was actually very interesting. From what I can tell (with research that still needs more verification), some of our deepest roots are in Scandanavia - Sweden and Norway in particular. Some of the Peterson relatives came to the New World from the Netherlands, but it appears that the Netherlands was just a one or two generation stop along the way here. And what is really fascinating is that Scandinavian records - unlike German records - go way back - so it is absolutely fun to follow the Ancestry.com "leaves to find hints that we may have connections to Swedish kings and Queen consorts.

I am still so curious about Grandma Hattie. I know a bit more now about her family roots, but what I really want to know is more about her. Dad said she was a good cook and there were always wonderful things to eat at her house. What was her specialty? She was born in Seneca County, New York just after the Seneca Falls Convention that kicked off the Woman's suffrage movement - was she a suffragette or sympathetic to that cause? How did she manage in her nearly 30 years of widowhood? Why did she chose to build a house next door to my Grandpa Johnston, her middle child? What would it have been like to be in her home as a child, as my father and his siblings were? How did she spend her time when she became a winter Texan in her later years?

Thus, learning about her renews my commitment to keep the story alive of my mother - so that my grandchildren will know her in ways that I wish I could know Grandma Hattie. I don't want them to wonder, was it Billie or Billie Mae?