Pauline P. Johnson and Isaac Newton Griffith

When she was eighteen, Pauline P. Johnson went against her family’s long-standing Quaker traditions and married another lapsed Quaker, Isaac Newton Griffith. Pauline was descended from the Johnsons of Scotland and the Moormans from Isle of Wight, England, who had come to Virginia as early as 1619.

Thomas Moorman returned to England after serving a year in the service of the Virginia Company of London and was granted property. Although Thomas never returned from England, his son, Zacariah Moorman, an avowed Quaker, did and by 1657 had married Mary Candler in Nansemond County, Virginia.

The Johnsons, also known as Johnstons, of Aberdeenshire, Scotland traced their family back to Gilbert de Johnston born in the late 1100s in Caskieben. They were a family of borderers, rugged raiders -- notoriously as bloodthirsty and cruel as the mythical Doone clan of Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s Lorna Doone. But their wild ways were tamed apparently by the then new religion of pacifism and love fostered by George Fox and the Johnsons -- like the Moormans -- became devout Quakers by the time they arrived in Virginia sometime before the end of the 1600s.

About 1793, John Griffith immigrated from Llanddyfnan, Wales, to Virginia. The following year, he married into another Quaker family -- the Thornburgs. The Thornburgs were an old landed family, originally of Lancashire, England, who, adopting their new faith, had immigrated and joined the Quaker Meeting at Cootehill, Ireland, and eventually moved yet again -- to Pennsylvania about 1714.

Isaac Newton’s parents, John Griffith and Hannah Thornburg, had both been removed from Quaker society for marrying out of the faith by the time they were wed. When Isaac and Pauline were married in 1834, they still retained some of the Quaker-like principles, however, for Isaac was deeply involved in the Underground Railroad in Ohio, helping runaway slaves escape to Canada. They had eight children, the youngest Helen Elizabeth* born only two years before Pauline’s tragic death in 1850.

Moving to new farmland in Iowa from Greene County, Ohio, the Griffiths' wagon overturned in a fast flowing creek, and Pauline was thrown into the icy December water. She lingered sometime and then finally succumbed to pneumonia as the new year approached.

*Helen Elizabeth Griffith is my great-great grandmother.