Richard Johnson feels right at home among the white marble tombstones of Cedar Hill Cemetery on Ritchie Highway.
He should. He's surrounded by relatives.
"I've got at least 350 people here," he says, standing before his great-great-great grandmother's grave on a clear August morning. "I've got them all over. I can walk all over these hills and show you where they're at."
Rick Johnson is a most happy and diligent genealogist. He's part the new wave of genealogists that arose with the nation's Bicentennial celebration and have made genealogy one of American most popular hobbies. These new genealogists looking into their own family histories are more often plain folks than DAR dowagers.
Johnson, 52, is a dock worker who left the waterfront after a serious knee injury in 1993. While he was still on crutches, he joined a cousin searching family records. He's been exploring the labyrinthine path through the generations of his forbears ever since.
"You just pick up pieces of information," he says.
Not quite. He's actually an indefatigable researcher who has tramped through acres of cemeteries, pored over years and years of records at the Maryland and National Archives and spent hours and hours and hours at his computer.
"It's like a puzzle," he says. "When I started I had a puzzle with big pieces like a kid's puzzle. Now I got one of those puzzles that's 3-D, with about 50,000 pieces. It's turned into a monster. And it's consuming, I'm telling you."
Johnson is perhaps typical of the new researchers.
"We've had an explosion of people interested in it," says Shirley Langdon Wilcox, president of the National Genealogical Society, which has more than doubled in ten years to 17,000 members. As baby boomers age and become interested in their past, the society adds about a thousand members a year.
And if computers have not revolutionized genealogy, they certainly speed up research, allow easier access to data and simplify trellising the family tree. The National Genealogical Society has a Web site (www.ngsgenealogy.org) that has had 87.5 million visitors since 1995, Wilcox reports.
Punch "genealogy" into your computer and you'll come up with more than a million and a half hits -- from an amazing online storehouse of family records that may include that black-sheep cousin you never wanted to hear about again; to frequently asked questions about your Italian, Croatian or Nova Scotian heritage, as well as every other conceivable ethnic group except perhaps Martian. There's even a Genealogy Mall and a Genealogy Flea Market.
Search continues
Rick Johnson has a virtual library of genealogy disks that help him organize and expand his research. His own genealogy now runs to 73 pages. But he hasn't yet found a Revolutionary War soldier. He has found lots of relatives who served in the War of 1812.
In Cedar Hill, he points out the gravestone of the earliest progenitor of his family he has so far identified: his great-great-great-grandfather Samuel Johnson.
Samuel Johnson not only served in the War of 1812, he was born on a frontier Army post near Kingston, Tenn., about two years after that state entered the Union. Davy Crockett, "king of the wild frontier," was born in Tennessee just 12 years earlier, but about 60 miles closer to civilization.
Rick Johnson thinks Samuel's father was a soldier, maybe even in the Revolutionary War, but he hasn't yet discovered his first name. He knows Samuel's mother was named Mary, but he hasn't found her maiden name.
"I keep looking through the Army records," Johnson says. They're at the National Archives in Washington, "but you can only look for so many hours. You got to read all Johnsons from A to Z, so that'd take years just traveling back and forth to D.C. But that's almost the only way I'm gong to find it."
Great-great-great-grandfather Samuel Johnson was born Feb. 22, 1798, at Fort South West Point, Tenn. He entered the U.S. Army as a drummer boy at the astonishing age of 10 years, 4 months and 8 days old. He stayed in about 40 years altogether. His half-brother, John Lumberson, was even younger when he became an Army drummer: just over 7.
Samuel Johnson also served in the Black Hawk, Seminole and Creek Indian "wars" and in the Mexican War, where he marched all way to Mexico City. He probably served with the redoubtable Gen. Winfield Scott in the Indian Wars and against the Mexicans. Lots of Winfield Scotts turn up in the Johnson genealogy, including Richard's great-grandfather.
In 1822, Sam Johnson married a Cuban woman named Josephine Florence Gonzales at Fernandina, Fla., an old Spanish town on Amelia Island, now near some fairly exclusive resorts. Johnson's minute research reveals that the wedding was performed by the splendidly named Squire Farquhar Bethune, a notary public born in Pensacola.
Josephine Gonzales Johnson is buried in the Cedar Hill plot with her husband and some of the children and grandchildren from the vast family they engendered.
"There are 1,526 people that I know who they are," Rick Johnson says. "Another 1,300 are related but I don't know how."
Computers help unearth all these people, but genealogists still need to dig through miles of files and haunt graveyards, both famous and forgotten. In fact, they seem to think there's nothing better in life than to slog through cemeteries, recording tombstone epitaphs.
"People look at us a little strangely when we get so excited talking about how we spend our vacations hiking through cemeteries or in some courthouse searching through dusty record books," concedes Shirley Wilcox, the National Genealogy Society president.
For genealogists, cemeteries are like big filing cabinets packed with information they can't get anywhere else: occupations, marriages, family relationships, military service, even sports and hobbies -- and just plain vital statistics like birth and death dates for folks buried before birth and death certificates were common.
Cemetery files help locate family graves, provide death and burial dates, often give addresses of survivors or plot owners, and especially important supply information on children who died young.
On his last hike through Cedar Hill, Johnson turned up the graves of eight more relatives. But his relationship with the cemetery management is a bit edgy. A couple of months ago, it rejected his request to search Cedar Hill records.
"I can see no legitimate reason for you to need any files from the cemetery," wrote Gary Johnson, regional director of sales and marketing for Stewart Enterprise, the national corporation that owns Cedar. "I wish you the best luck and ask you not to request any additional information."
In a phone interview, Gary Johnson said Stewart Enterprise treats requests for records on a case-by-case basis. It probably would help somebody looking for a couple of names for a nominal fee, "about $25," he says. It balks at giving somebody named Johnson, the second most common name in the United States, free rein in its records.
"We are here to serve the living and protect the rights of the dead," he says. "I would have to look at who wants it and why they want it."
Rick Johnson, who suggested he might find that the cemetery executive was a relative, scoffed at the "rights to privacy" idea, saying the last person he checked died 78 years ago.
Even the National Genealogy Society's Wilcox was a little taken aback: "I don't quite know how you protect the privacy of the dead."
Stewart Enterprises, with headquarters in Metairie, La., is the third-largest cemetery and funeral home conglomerate in the nation, with more than a half-billion dollars in sales. It owns 507 funeral homes and 133 cemeteries around the world.
Along with Cedar Hill, Stewart Enterprises owns Loudon Park, Druid Ridge, Parkwood and Crest Lawn in this area.
Despite Rick Johnson's snag, the Genealogy Society hasn't been getting complaints about genealogists denied access to cemetery records.
"Circumstances vary from cemetery to cemetery," says Robert Barnes, president of the Baltimore County Genealogical Society. You have to pick your moment ... and be nice."
He says he was treated "very cordially" at Stewart's Druid Ridge cemetery.
Not everyone has trouble at Cedar Hill, either. In a labor of loving research that took six years, Audrey Bagby, a founder of the Maryland Coalition to Protect Burial Sites and a past president of the Anne Arundel Genealogical Society, and lots of friends, copied the inscriptions on every tombstone in the cemetery. That's about 40,000 names, dates and epitaphs.
"We went out every Monday and copied tombstones," Bagby says. "Sometimes it was so hot we thought our brains would fry and sometimes it got so cold our fingers froze."
They photocopied interment records, too, from 1893 on. No records for the cemetery's first 15 years survive. Bagby suspects that Cedar Hill may have been a mom-and-pop operation with sloppy record-keeping early on.
Bagby hopes to publish two volumes on Cedar Hill fairly soon -- they're in the proofing stage -- which will be a boon to Rick Johnson in his search. Meanwhile, he has enough to do tracing allied families and patching them into his genealogical network.
"When you work on this as much as I have," he says, "you get a feeling like they're here."
Family history
At Cedar Hill, his great-great-grandmother Josephine Gonzales Johnson lies beneath a plain white stone carved with the epitaph: "Loved in life/In death remembered."
"I first find Samuel and his family coming here with the Army in 1827," Rick Johnson says. Samuel Johnson was assigned to Fort McHenry. Their daughter Virginia was born aboard the schooner Fox bringing the Johnsons north to their new post in Baltimore Harbor.
Their son, Johnson's great-great grandfather, Augustus Frederick, was born at Fort McHenry and their youngest daughter, Emily, too.
"From then on they stay right in South Baltimore," Johnson says, and their genealogy becomes a kind of folk history of the old South Baltimore neighborhoods.
After he left the Army, Sam Johnson became a watch officer before there was a police force and held the quaint old caretaker post of "Keeper of Battery Square," which is now Riverside Park. He bought a house at 103 E. Hamburg St. for $500 in 1852. It remained in the family until his daughter sold it just before her death in 1927. Now No. 38 and beautifully restored, Johnson observes in his genealogical records, it's "a very, fine example of what a small row house must have been like in Baltimore City."
Sam Johnson's three sons all fought for the Union in the Civil War, and when Sam died in 1871 he was buried in a $25 walnut coffin. His funeral cortege included 12 hacks and the hearse from Charles F. Herold, a Hanover street furniture dealer and "undertaker of funerals."
Rick Johnson's great-great-grandfather Augustus Frederick was a chair-maker, a police officer and an oyster measurer. He served with the First Maryland Cavalry in the Civil War.
His great-grandfather, Winfield Scott Johns, worked on the railroad and his grandfather and father, Joseph Winfield Johnson Sr. and Jr., became shipyard and dock workers.
"It's history," Johnson says. "It's your history, your family's history."
But your family history can also be foreboding. Johnson also learned that his family has a 200-year history of bad hearts -- a record of strokes and heart attacks.
"I know I have to go here soon," he says, at Cedar Hill. "It doesn't faze me a bit. I spend a lot of time here living. I guess I'll spend a lot of time here dead."
Pub Date: 8/25/98