To fully know where you are going, its important to know where you have come from!

John Johnston, your great-great grandfather, was born in Ireland in June 1843, in the midst of one of the potato famines that ravaged Ireland in the 1840's and 1850's. Sometime between 1850 and 1852, the family immigrated to Southeastern Ontario, Canada. John, his brother Robert, and father John farmed the land and homesteaded in Huron County, north of the Great Lakes.

It was there that he met Sarah Jones, born in Ontario in 1851, whose family had immigrated from Wales several years before. They married in December 1875 in Seaforth, Ontario and initially settled near their families.

Many folks were moving to the United States, where there were new opposrtunities to aquire land. John and Sarah moved with several other families in the area to a settlement appropriately named "Canada Hill", near St. Paul, Nebraska in 1876. They homesteaded there and began a family. Between then and the early 1890's they farmed and John also worked by shipping horses for the U.S. Government. The horses would be taken by train from the Great Plains to points in the eastern U.S. On one of the trips, he visited Central Florida, at the end of the railroad line, a new town named Kissimmee. The entire family moved there in the early 1890's and settled near the railroad tracks and also farmed a large piece of land on Boggy Creek.

The family remained in Osceola County, following John's death in 1915. His wife moved to Avon Park(in Highlands County), where she lived until her death in 1931.

This is the family of your great grandfather, Joseph E. Johnston.