Samuel Johnson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Samuel Johnson (1730–1778), a 7× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Northamptonshire, English parentage, marriage to Mary Allyne Otis, his son Stephen Otis Johnson, his death in London, and Georgian-era English context.

Samuel Johnson (1730–1778) was born in the year 1730 in the parish of Islip, in Northamptonshire, England, a rural county in the East Midlands long given to husbandry, stone-built villages, and the steady rhythms of the Church of England. He was the son of William Johnson (1711–1763) and Elizabeth Smith (1708–1788), a Northamptonshire couple whose own dates place them squarely within the early Georgian generation of English provincial life.

The England into which Samuel was born was that of the early reign of King George II — a kingdom in which the agricultural countryside of the Midlands existed in close commerce with the swelling metropolis of London, drawing young men of every station southward to the capital for trade, profession, or service. Northamptonshire in this period was known for its small market towns and for the early stirrings of the shoe and leather trades that would later distinguish the county.

Samuel was united in marriage to Mary Allyne Otis, a union which carried the Johnson name into association with the Otis family, a surname of consequence in the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth century. Of this marriage was born at least one son recorded in the family register, Stephen Otis Johnson (1762–1817), whose middle name preserved his mother's lineage and through whom the line descends to the compiler.

Samuel Johnson died on the 9th of August, 1778, in London, in the county of Middlesex, at the age of approximately forty-eight years. His passing in the capital, rather than in the Northamptonshire parish of his birth, suggests the not uncommon pattern of provincial Englishmen drawn into the orbit of London during the latter half of the eighteenth century, an age in which the city had become the unrivalled center of British commerce and society.

Samuel Johnson was a 7× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.