Virginia Eugenia was born on May 28, 1839, in Buckhead, Morgan County, Georgia, the only child of Helen M. Johnston and John Peebles Emerson. Little is know of John or Helen's ancestry, although oral family history maintains that John was descended from a Navy Captain who was lost at sea. There appears to be a relationship with the Peebles family, judging from the names of John's children with Sarah Fitzpatrick.
John first married Sarah Matthews Fitzpatrick, daughter of Benjamin Fitzpatrick and widow of Charles Matthews. They had ????? children, but only one, Elizabeth Cook Emerson, survived to marry and have children. After Sarah died, John married Helen Johnston.
We don't know much about Virginia Eugenia's early life. Her father died when she was only ??? years old but Virginia Eugeinia was amply provided for by her late father, inheriting both money for her education and slaves. She became a pupil of Thomas Weyland, a popular teacher in Marietta, GA. She traveled back and forth from Stone Mountain by train. When she was 12 years old, she was living at Andrew Johnson's hotel in Stone Mountain. About this time, Thomas' younger sister, Mary, married Dr. John L. Hamilton, who also lived at the hotel. Apparently, this is where Thomas met Virginia. In September, 1856, when Virginia was 17 years old, she married 26 year old Thomas Johnson, second son of Elizabeth and andrew Johnson, in Dekalb County, Georgia. Over the next 20 years, she and Thomas had nine children.
Thomas preceded Virginia in death by 22 years. When he died, she still had some young children to raise.
TImes were very hard for many years during and after the Civil Was and the family had to move quite often. Virginia's daughter, Ida Eugenia, remembered that her mother had very little training in domestic activities, accustomed as she had been to having slaves. She took refuge in playing the piano. Finally, just a few years before her death, Virginia received a Confederate widow's pension of about $6.00 a month from the State of Georgia. She lived to be 70 years old. On November 22, 1909, she died in Gwinnett County. The weather was inclimate and roads impassable, making it impossible to travel the long distance to Macedonia Baptist Church Cemetery in Dekalb County where Thomas had been buried years earlier. For this reason, she was buried at nearby Yellow River Baptist Church Cemetery in the same plot where one of her sons, Franklin, who died in 1900, was buried. Her son Tommy's first wife, Belle Kennerly, and their infant child who died on the same day as Belle, are also buried in this cemetery.
courtesy of Cora Whitley Lambert & Hazel Britt Mitchell |
