Hodges1 Avery Hodges Professor Raymond English 1103 October 14, 2013 My Family History From all the

research and as far back as I could find, was from my mothers side of the family. It was my eighth great grandfather, MacEwan Johnson who was born in 1700 in Scotland. Even though my country of origin is Scotland, it seems that my ancestors emigrated from Ireland, (Hodges Family Tree). MacEwan Johnson married an Irish woman and they had three sons born in Ireland. Some historical information on the two countries is that the capital of Scotland is Edinburgh. Scotland was in a union with Ireland until James VI of Scotland succeeded to the Irish throne in 1603. Then the Kingdom of Scotland became an independent state until 1707 when the state entered into a union with England to form Great Britain. The capital of Ireland is Dublin which means black pool, (Dublin). However my ancestors were from the County of Tyrone which means land of Eoghan, (County of Tyrone). Eoghan is an early Irish male name which is another form of Egann which refers to several names, one of being MacEwan, a Scottish name, (Eoghan). Between December 1739 and September 1741, a climatic shock known as the Great Frost struck Ireland after a decade of mild winters. This destroyed stored crops and already damaged crops. About 250,000 people died from pestilence and disease and this resulted in the famine of 1740, (Ireland). The reason I include both countries is because MacEwans children were of Scotch-Irish descent. William Johnston Johnson, son of MacEwan, married a Scottish woman, just the

Hodges2 opposite of his father. Through the research, I learned that they were not very creative when it came to naming their children. They would take their wives maiden name and use that as a childs middle name, which I have a few examples included later in my family history. Some would name their children after an uncle or aunt. There were several people with the same name which made this research confusing and to make it worse, some had last names of Johnson and some were Johnstons. Some did not have any middle names. Some had four names and would later go by just the three names. William, for example, had nine children. Four had the last name of Johnson, three had the last name of Johnston, and one had the last name of Johnstone. In 1700, Johnston was one of the four most common names in Fermanagh, which is one of the six counties in Northern Ireland, (Ireland). William and his two brothers crossed the ocean to America from Ireland in 1737. They landed in Charleston, South Carolina. One brother settled in Virginia, one in Pennsylvania, and William in North Carolina. It was interesting to me to know that I was born in North Carolina and had an ancestor first settle here 276 years ago. Another piece of history I learned was that a lot of my ancestors were farmers and reverends. Also most of my grandfathers have served in the military for the United States, (Ammon). William Johnson had a son named John Johnson, who had a son name Neill Johnson, who was a reverend. He wrote an autobiography that explained who his parents and grandparents were and where they originated from. Neill also had a son named John Johnson, but had a middle name of Lawrence. Neill had a brother, Archibald, who was also a Reverend. John Lawrence Johnson wrote a diary called Crossing the Plains which described his journey with his brothers, sisters, and parents from Illinois to Oregon, (Hodges Family Tree). He

Hodges3 described every single day from April 1, 1851 to September 14, 1851. In these excerpts he talked about his travels with his father through the Appalachian mountains. Another interesting fact that I learned about my second great grandmother Lucille Johnston is that she had a brother Donald Boysden Johnston. Boysden was his mothers maiden name also. Donald was a captain for Pitcairn Aviation which is now known as Eastern Airlines. He was one of the first air-mail pilots. He is in a book called From the Captain to the Colonel, An Informal History of Eastern Airlines by Robert J. Serling. He logged in at 2500 hours, rated as a greenhorn and in 1927 you had to be not only good but lucky because the majority of those hours were spent in unreliable aircraft instruments in inadequate fields, flying in conditions that made accidents probable. On December 1, 1928 was the first mail taken from Atlanta to Miami. Don flew the mail from Jacksonville to Miami and landed safely even though it was dark and no runway lights. He used to say he would never die in an airplane but his luck ran out around the time period of World War II. On September 22, 1942 he was taking off in Miami when an Army bomber, landing without clearance and no lights collided with him head-on. He was only 40 years old, (Hodges Family Tree). To finish the history back to me, Neill Johnson had an uncle named James Johnstone, who had a son named Francis Nathaniel Johnston E. Francis had a son, Robert Ewing Johnston who had a son Robert Foster Johnson. Foster is his mothers maiden name. Robert had a daughter Lucille Elizabeth Johnston who had a son named Bob Van Atlee Ammon. Bob later dropped the Atlee and went by Van. Van had son named Jeffrey Lynn Ammon who had a daughter named Shanda Michelle Ammon who is my mother, (Hodges Family Tree). This is my family history. It is where my elders descended from to where I am now. I am proud to be a

Hodges4 part of such an amazing family, and now my children and their kids will know where we came from.

Hodges5 Works Cited Ammon, Jeff. Personal Interview. October 3rd, 2013. "Dublin." Wikipedia. N.p., wikipedia.org 08 Oct. 2013. Web. 13 Oct 2013. "County of Tyrone." Wikipedia. N.p., 12 Oct. 2013. Web. 13 Oct 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_Tyrone>. "Hodges Family Tree." Ancestry.com. N.p., 12 Oct. 2013. Web. 12 Oct 2013. "Egan." Wikipedia. N.p., wikipedia.org 02 May 2013. Web. 13 Oct 2013. "Agnes Johnstone." Family Tree Maker. N.p. familytreemaker.genealogy.com. Web. 12 Oct 2013. "Ireland." Wikipedia. N.p., wikipedia.org 09 Oct. 2013. Web. 13 Oct 2013.