Topic: Brick Wall.

Was the Rev. John Johnston married twice?

My GG Uncle John Johnston (1831-1909) married Benjamina “Jessie” Leckie (1833 – ?) in Glasgow when he was 24 and she was 22, according to the forms of the United Presbyterian Church. Soon after the birth of their first child less than a year later, they moved to Edinburgh where John studied for the Congregational Ministry at the Edinburgh Theological Hall. This was a little surprising seeing the Johnstons were mostly strong Presbyterians with several Reverends among the immediate family.

John and Jessie had five children between 1857 and 1863, all born in Scotland – Edinburgh (two) and then Stirlingshire (two). The last one, a little daughter named Jane, lived for less than a year. She was born in Pitsligo, Aberdeenshire.


Some time after that the family moved to Stoke Newington in London where John was the Congregationalist Minister at the Abney Park Memorial Church. Another child was born in 1874, eleven years after Jane. A surprise!

The 1871 Census was checked – and John had declared himself a “widower”. There was no doubt the Census entry was for the correct family, according to the address given. So, was John’s youngest child, born three years after this Census, by a different mother also named Jessie (who maiden surname was not given)? Unless the first Jessie was away from home at the time and the Census taker made an incorrect assumption about John being a widower?

A transcript of the birth certificate for the 1874-born child gave the information that the mother’s maiden surname was Will, but no christian name given. It could easily have been Wills, Mill(s), etc as is the nature of transcriptions.

Surprisingly a possible marriage was found, for a John Johnston to Susan Mills, in Isleworth, London on 8 January 1865. (No indication of whether this John was a Reverend). John’s last child with his first wife was born in October 1863 and died in February 1864 in Pitligo, Aberdeenshire. Was this the correct John Johnston? Isleworth (in the South West West) and Stoke Newington (in the North), while both within the area known as ‘Greater London’, are 25 km apart which would have been a far greater distance in those days than is considered now. However, John’s living children at that time would have been aged 8, 6, 5 and 3 – definitely children in need of a mother!

But a further search recently has turned up a Jessie C. Will born about 1839 in Aberdeen to Thomas and Margaret Will, living in Hackney, London in 1871 with her parents – aged 32, unmarried, occupation not given. If this was the correct Jessie, she must have married John later in 1871 (the Censuses were usually taken early in the year). Hackney is very close to Stoke Newington.

I feel reasonably certain I have found the correct second wife, but all searches for a marriage have so far been negative.

Themes: Family Secret and Siblings.

I am behind with this series of 52 Ancestors but conveniently can combine two weeks’ stories into one!

I nearly missed recording the birth and death of my GGGrandparents’ fourth child, a little girl called Zebra Hunt who was born in November 1831 and died in July 1834 in Reading, Berkshire. As was common at the time, the death of a child was rarely if ever spoken about …. But I am still surprised that Zebra’s elder sister Elizabeth (aged 11 at the time Zebra was born) never spoke about her even much later in life. Elizabeth was a nurse and the Matron on an immigrant ship arriving in Australia in 1864. She would have seen her share of children’s deaths particularly as she later worked as an accoucheuse (midwife) in Sydney.

The name Zebra may have been a form of Ziporah, a popular name in Victorian times. Another form was Zillah. That was the name given to another distant cousin born in 1843, while yet another was Lizzie Zebra born 1863 (yes, Lizzie, not Elizabeth). The latter had several children including Elizabeth Stella born in 1903; she became a dancing teacher who styled herself “Estella Donalda Zebra Eugene Brown-de-Boshier”, Boshier being her mother Lizzie Zebra’s maiden surname.

Little Zebra only came to light when a cousin started to wonder where the name Zillah came from, and also noticed there was an almost five year gap between Zebra’s immediate siblings. Otherwise we would probably never have discovered her (My grateful thanks to Alison P. for her research in this regard).

Curiously, there was also a 4 year gap between the first two children – Elizabeth born in 1820 and Reuben in 1824 (the family moved from Worcestershire to Berkshire during that time, perhaps when father Thomas Hunt was seeking work); then 5 years until Emma appeared in 1829, followed by Zebra in Nov 1831 and then Mary Ann in October 1833 – and finally Edwin in 1937 who must have been quite a surprise as their mother, my namesake Nancy, would have been aged 47 by then.