Thank you for looking at the communication website for this publication project, which was started by my father in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, due to his untimely death, in 1989, and my own pursuits in other directions, since that time, his outline ideas, for that proposed publication, have remained, just that, for over 30 years.
I have now decided that it is time to pick up my father’s challenge and seek to finish it. The project is likely to take anything between two and ten years. I am now 63½ years of age and I trust and hope that I will live long enough to see this project completed.
I am supported in this project by Michael Archer, one of my third cousins, who lives in Norfolk, England.
Basically, put as succinctly as I can, but also, I know, rather clumsily, the proposed work is to be an attempt to record all the descendants of the marriage of Samuel Johnson and Anne Lawler, who married at St. Andrew’s, Dublin, Ireland on the 24th of February 1696, plus the ancestors and descendants thereof of all (or at least a reasonable subset) of the spouses of those descendants of the said Samuel and Anne, up to the level of the spouses of the 4 Greats Grandchildren of Samuel.
93 such families, including the Johnson family, have been identified; further research may lead to some more, but it will probably not grow to be any more than 150, at the extreme. A cut-off line has been identified at the 6 greats grandchildren level, which is roughly those marriages that occurred in the mid 20th century: if I were to choose to include the 7 and 8 greats grandchildren’s spouses’ families (i.e. the currently living and married), that would grow the number of families to nigh on 400 or more; such an undertaking would be impractical, this project is huge enough already, I did not want to make it gargantuan.
Samuel Johnson (1675-), his descendants and families linked to them by marriage 