The story
This is the one line still in Britain within living memory of the family's Texas generations. George Johnson was born in 1791 at Brancepeth, in County Durham, and never left; his son John Joseph Johnson, born at Lanchester in 1831, married Martha Mary Pattison of Yorkshire; and their son Joseph — Joe — was born in 1863 at Ford Lodge, Lanchester, in coal country. Three generations of that family now lie in Austin ground.
The road out ran through Liverpool, and the tree's own dates draw it precisely. A baby born at Ford Lodge in February 1866 died at Greenbank, Liverpool, in January 1867, so the move off the coalfield came in 1866–67; the family appears in the 1871 Liverpool census; the last child born in England was baptized at Liverpool in May 1872, and the first born in Texas arrived in Austin on New Year's Day 1875. The crossing falls between mid-1872 and late 1874 — a coal-county family that stopped six years in the great port city before deciding to go the rest of the way.
And here is the finding that unlocked this side, and why it had been stuck: everyone who had looked for these Johnsons had been searching Anglican parish registers, and finding almost nothing. They were Catholic. The parents married at Croxdale Chapel — the Salvin family's recusant chapel at Croxdale Hall, one of the households that had quietly kept the old faith through three centuries of penal law. The Liverpool baptisms sit in the registers of St Patrick's, a Catholic parish. And the children's names say it plainly once you notice: Edward Aloysius, Catherine Teresa, John Simon Stephen, Anne Julianna. English Catholic families are hard to trace precisely because they were meant to be — their records are in mission registers, a different set of books in a different archive. Nothing was lost; it was simply never in the volumes anyone had opened.
There is an unexpected rhyme here: the Plunketts, on the other side of this family, were Catholics in Penal-Law Ireland at almost exactly the same period. Two of the eight lines were on the wrong side of the same laws.
Joe Johnson married Flora Ann Morgan, and their daughter Ada Mae Johnson was born at Hornsby Bend, on the Colorado River east of Austin, in 1892. The Morgan side runs back up the South Carolina piedmont — Beaufort to Greenville to Georgia to Texas in four generations — and it must be said plainly, because this room's rule is to grade honestly: the Morgan half is the least trustworthy material in this wing. It came into the tree through automated record-matching rather than research, and most of those South Carolina people carry no source at all. Treat it as a sketch of a route, not a proof of descent. The Durham side, by contrast, is solid.
One deliberate blank, which is not a gap but a decision: Cornelia Carter's parents are not in the tree, on purpose. Her death certificate names her father only as “Carter” and her mother as “YATES” — enough to know they existed, not enough to name anyone. The blank is the honest answer until a record fills it.