My father died when I was 7, so that I inherited the Johnston Family Bible begun in Canada in the 1860's. Seeing the names of all those ancestors led me to want to connect with them, and I began a lifelong family history quest.
One of those in the Family Bible was Emma Butson Johnston, mother of my then-still-living Great Grandfather. Emma and her husband John Johnston brought their young family from Pickering Township, Ontario, Canada to Chicago in 1881, when my Great Grandfather George Henry Johnston was only 4 years old.
My Great Grandfather knew of his mother's sister Mary Jane Butson, who had emigrated to and died in North Dakota. And I did find Emma Butson Johnston's lone grave at Oakwoods Cemetery in Chicago. But otherwise, I knew very little about the Butson family.
In the 1950's and 1960's, I gradually gathered a bit more information. I was able to do some research by mail, and I found published British records in the stacks of the University of Illinois library. But I still had far more questions than answers.
In the early 1970's, I lived in Springfield, Illinois, with access to the Illinois State Archives, and I greatly improved my genealogical skills. This included gathering more information about the Butson family, though still very little in hindsight.
The big breakthrough came in 1976. I had already joined the Ontario Genealogical Society and corresponded with Whitby (Ontario) historian Brian Winter. But the breakthrough came when I obtained the will of Mary Jane Butson, my GGMother's sister. It pointed to their father Henry Butson last known to be living in or near Lindsay, Ontario. So I managed to find a telephone book of Lindsay and found there was a Butson living there. I called him, and he put me in touch with Cameron Vivian of Staffa, Ontario, who knew a lot more about the Butson family reunions that had been held.
In Summer 1977, I drove from Springfield, Illinois to Ottawa, Ontario, in order to attend the OGS conference at Carleton University. Along the way, I stopped and visited Butson family members, starting with Cameron & Ellen Vivian in Staffa. I gathered a great deal of information along the way -- and even more at the archives in Toronto and Ottawa.
In fact, I had so much information and so many names and addresses, that I decided to begin the "Butson Family Newsletter" in Fall 1979, as a way of sharing the information that I had gathered and also inviting others to share their information.
In 1981, I made my only trip to Cornwall. In looking back on it, I wonder how I was able to know about and visit so many places. It was an extremely rich and memorable trip. If all goes well, I will finally return in 2013 with my youngest grandson.
All in all, I published 10 issues of the "Butson Family Newsletter" before events in my life forced me to set it -- and almost all genealogical work -- aside in the late 1980's. By then, I had about 300 people on the mailing list and had found Butsons on every continent - even Antarctica.
I did continue some research and managed eventually to start a web site on which I intended to put the transcriptions of the 10 issues of the Butson Family Newsletter (now at www.wwjohnston.net/butsons). But in 1995, I developed chronic fatigue, and everything went into boxes, and David Butson took over the web site and started www.butson.net. All genealogical work came to a halt, as my life became more and more focused on dealing with my declining health. After 5 extremely difficult years, I eventually found a doctor who had had chronic fatigue himself and had been forced to find the cause and a solution. It turned out that my problems all arose from a 1991 root canal, and so in early 2001 I had oral surgery to at least stop the decline. While the decline ended and I have regained some stamina, the effect of 10 years of the problems had taxed my body's resources beyond any ability to ever fully recover. But at least I became able to function and very slowly improve.
And so in late 2001, inspired by questions from a cousin at my sister's wedding, I resumed genealogical work after a long hiatus. Having worked with computers since the 1960's, I was well equipped to make excellent use of the internet. And my research has flourished. In fact, I suffer from having found too many cousins to ever be able to keep up regular correspondence with all of them. And that has led me to create even more web pages, all of which you can find on my family history page. The links to those of my web pages that are relevant to the Butson family are also included on the main Early Butson page.
In 2012, after these Early Butson pages had begun, I made two trips to visit the graves of all four of the Butson sisters: my 2nd great grandmother Emma Butson Johnston in Chicago, sister Mary Jane Butson in Leeds, North Dakota, sister Susannah Butson Potter in Toronto, Ontario and sister Sarah Butson Ellis in Scarborough, Ontario. And I wrote the paper "Diverse Destinies: The Butson Sisters" about them for the Ontario Genealogical Society's "Families" quarterly.