Five Florida Generations

By Tom Johnson

A North Florida Genealogy that includes the surnames Garner, Landen, Smith, Johnson, Webb, Sullivan, Parker, Stevens, Underwood, Vernadore and others of the North Florida Counties Lafayette, Madison, Suwannee and Taylor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Johnson
• Release date: Mar 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370105045

Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson is former senior editor at Netflix and has written movie reviews and features for E! Online, Moviefone, and People magazine, among other publications. His entertainment writing has been recognized with a Minnesota Newspaper Association achievement award and a National Hearst Foundation award for news writing.

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Introduction

This genealogy covers approximately five generations of Tom Johnson and Lydia Hazel Smith Johnson’s family ancestors. Both are descended from early Florida pioneer settlers who began arriving in North Central Florida prior to the mid 1800’s.

How far back in generations the narrative and genealogy reports go was limited by the availability of documentation I had access to. It is not an in-depth writing and I did not interview any family members in any detail nor did I travel widely to research local records other than the Florida State Archives in Tallahassee. There is some speculation on my part about possible relationships and why certain things happened and also a number of calculated connections on some of the persons in this book and I try to point these out whenever I make them. Any mistakes in facts or details are totally my own but what I wrote is based on knowledge of what I have found during my 20 plus years of research, but I’m sure I don’t have every detail correct.

I write in the third person but may slip in to the first person occasionally. I refer to my Mother and Father as Tom and Hazel (that’s harder to do than you think) and the ascending family lines by first and last names.

Chapter 1

Early Family Pioneers

Garner, Johnson, Landen, Parker, Peacock, Smith, Sullivan, Stevens, Underwood, Webb,

The arrival in America of the various Johnson and Smith ancestors was not researched in any depth but based on available historical information the most common route for settlers who immigrated in to the South Eastern colonies, and later States, was either from Europe by ship to various ports along the east coast or they migrated down from the northern colonies as land availability become more restricted or scarce in those areas. An assumption can be made that the Johnson and Smith ancestors probably followed this same pattern of arrival.

Based on the surnames of the majority most originated in England, Ireland or Scotland, with a couple of exceptions, the surname of Futch on the Smith branch side has been traced to German ancestry and the name Landen has some Nordic links and is found in some Spanish regions (there is a web site devoted to Spanish Landens genealogy) but primarily originates out of England assuming the original Nordic Landens arrived in England via the Norman invasion. In the Smith surname portion of the book I include some information by another researcher on the Landen surname that was posted online.

Migration in to North Florida

American settlers from neighboring states where moving in to the North Florida area as soon as it became a US possession and Territory in 1821 and even earlier with land grants from the Spanish. The Johnson and Smith ancestors would be part of this early pioneer migration and start arriving not too many years after it became a US possession with the earliest documented arrival being sometime prior to 1839 of James Garner, Great Grandfather of Tom Johnson.

The arrival of the more numerous branches of the Smith surname begin sometime in the mid to early 1840’s when William Axiom Webb and William Sullivan Jr, Great-great Grandfathers of Hazel Smith, arrived

These early family settlers would make homes in the middle North Florida area, primarily in Madison and Lafayette Counties and early census records show that farming was the main occupation of these settlers, with the exception of one short-lived cattle operation by the Sullivans in the 1840’s.

Madison, which was a large county in the early days, would later be partitioned to create other counties, including Taylor County. Part of this area encompasses the fertile Suwannee River valley, an area created by the Suwannee River forming a loop when after entering Florida from Georgia first flows west then turns south and then back east before heading to the Gulf of Mexico and would include the area that eventually became Suwannee County and the birth county of Hazel Smith.

The pioneering and settling of early Florida went slowly at first but begin increasing sharply after the Civil War. Statehood came to Florida in 1845 and the last of the Seminole wars ended in 1858. On the eve of the Civil War Florida had the smallest population of all the Southern States. This small population included all the major surnames of Tom and Hazel’s ancestry tree, many of whom would serve in the Confederate army during the war.

Chapter 2

Johnson Ancestry

183?-1935

Greenville Madison County Florida

Greenville, Florida, located in Madison County was originally known by the name of Sandy Ford, named for a ford across the Aucilla River. According to the WPA writers book on Florida the Sandy Ford name was from around 1850 and prior to that the only references to the area is the name of Aucilla Settlement derived from an earlier Spanish plantation that was located in the area in the 1600’s. The Sandy Ford settlement would later be relocated a short distance and renamed station number 5 being the fifth station on the railroad that ran between Tallahassee and Jacksonville. The name Greenville was adopted, according to one source, because the majority of the settlers came from Greenville, South Carolina. Another story is that a women’s society in the area would sew clothes for confederate soldiers and ship them out to Richmond, VA and after the first shipment went out the ladies were told by a Confederate Quartermaster that they would have to have a name other than Station Five to ship them so they came up with the name Greenville.

One of the few descriptions of Greenville is found in a book about singer Ray Charles, Greenville's famous son, written by Michael Lydon in 1998, below is an excerpt that contains the description:

In 1776 that territory was a wilderness. Then white settlers brought slaves to fell the virgin forests and to plant cotton and tobacco, wresting the land from the Indians and the Spanish, until in 1821 Spain ceded the whole peninsula to the new United States of America. Sandy Ford, at a ford on the Aucilla River, was the first settlement to spring