Descendants of James Thomas Catchings & Ada Mae Johnson

How to read this place

Everything here is labeled from where I stand — ✦ direct ancestor, "my 3×-great-grandfather." Here is the useful accident of cousinhood: if you are my second cousin, we stand the same number of steps from everyone we share, so within your rooms my labels are literally yours, unchanged. One generation off — once removed either way — and every person page has an "I am:" picker that relabels the whole site for your generation and remembers your choice.

One honest caveat: outside the Catchings & Johnson rooms, a person marked ✦ is my direct ancestor but not yours — the fan above shows exactly where the boundary runs.

Your rooms

Of the eight family rooms in this wing, these are the ones that are your direct ancestry:

Catchings

Wilkes County, Georgia → Crow Creek, Tennessee → Travis County, Texas → Taft, in South Texas

The oldest American claim in the family — a Virginia courtroom in 1638 — and a documented line from Georgia bounty land through a Tennessee valley where the railroad stop bore the family's name, to farms outside Austin and on to Taft in South Texas.

Step into the Catchings room →

Johnson

Lanchester, County Durham → Liverpool → Austin

Coalfield Catholics, married at a recusant chapel and invisible in the Anglican registers everyone had searched — by way of six years in Liverpool to Austin in the early 1870s.

Step into the Johnson room →

Stories already written about your people

Correspondence between Eugene Catchings and Chloye West — Five years of letters, from sixteen years old to married, 1947–1952 — in their own hands.
Her Mark: The Will of Anastasia Catching, 1807 — A widow with three surnames among her children, dictating the family record the county never kept — signed with her mark.

The family albums

Catchings–Johnson–Carpenter–West scanned photoson Google Photos
Catchings–Johnsonon Google Photos
Ada Mae Johnson Catchingson Google Photos

The albums live on Google Photos, shared by link. Unlike the tree, they may include living family — they are photographs, not records.

Start with these people

✦ James Thomas Catchings (1882–1944) & Ada Mae Johnson (1892–1976)

Our shared great-grandparents — the couple every reader of this page descends from. Their two pages are the place to start walking.

Meredith Catchings, Sr.

c. 1740–c. 1798 · Catchings room

Grants on Little River and Kettle Creek; deeded nine slaves and died within days.

George Johnson

1791–c. 1846 · Johnson room

Born at Brancepeth in the Durham coalfield; never left England.

The rest of the wing

The whole wing — the landing page, with all eight rooms, the case files, and everything below.
The moment machine — pick any date in history and see which ancestors were alive that day; your shared people are in every cohort.
The atlas — the migration map and the Ring of Proof, drawn from the whole tree, your lines included.
Every name in the tree — and every name is a page.
Take the tree with you — the GEDCOM file, free, no account. Living family members are not in it.

Wrong door? The picker lists them all. And if you hold a piece of this story — a letter, a photograph, a correction — that is exactly what publishing it is for.