The earliest reference to my Johnson origins is that to the occupation of John Johnson, (b. abt 1810) as a "husbandman" on the certificate of marriage between his son, John Johnson (b. 1831) and Margaret Potts, born in Cramlington in 1831. Her father, Robert Potts describes himself as a pitman.
The marriage took place in Gateshead. John Johnson (b. 1831) shows himself in the 1861, 1871 and 1881 censuses to have been born in Seaton Delaval. He was a blacksmith in the mines, mainly at Tursdale and sometime at Sleetburn. In the 1881 census he lived with his family at Plantation St, Brandon. There were 3 daughters and six sons from the marriage.
Joseph Johnson, my grandfather, was the youngest child. He was born in 1875 and his mother was to die in 1878, when he was two and a half years old. Joseph married Eleanor Hannah Higginbottom, known as Ellen, born in 1876 at Low Willington, and they had a family of one girl, Elsie, and two boys.
Joseph worked in Sleetburn Colliery as a hewer until he moved the family to Redcar to the newly opened Dorman Long steel works in the early 1920s. He worked there as a blastfurnace man. His daughter, Elsie, married Archibald Drinnan Mahan on 24 Dec 1922 and became the mother of Keith Drinnan Mahan. The number of Johnsons, most of whom called their first born sons John, makes research difficult in the Durham/ Northumberland area.
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