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Town’s Past Is Johnson’s Passion
Spend a portion of
a morning with Lois Crabtree Johnson, and you get a new perspective
on old times in Hancock.
Lois Crabtree Johnson, curator for the Hancock Historical
Society, helps a visitor with his search for family roots. |
This is especially
true if the morning you choose is Tuesday between 10 and noon, from
May to September.
Those are the hours
the Hancock Historical Society is open. If you want to arrange a
private, off-hours tour of the archives, Johnson might be agreeable
to that, too.
Johnson is
Hancock’s unofficial historian, and a loquacious one at that.
“They are still
talking about the spies landing at Hancock Point (in 1944),” she
said. “But there really is more to our town history than that.”
As a
sixth-generation resident descended from the town’s original
settler, Agreen Crabtree, Johnson can speak of Hancock’s past
perhaps more authoritatively than anyone else in town.
She grew up here,
married and went away for 30 years to Leavittown, Pa. Twenty years
ago, when her husband retired, she returned and started piecing
together her own family’s story.
Before long she was
well immersed in the early settlements of Hancock and Sullivan.
Tracing the local past has become her passion.
“I grew up never
hearing my family talk about family history at all,” she said. “But
that was standard for that time.
“I was a married
woman before I realized that the woman I used to buy my penny candy
from was my father’s first cousin.”
One of the first
people who realized her renewed interest in Hancock was teacher and
author Sandy Phippen, also a member of the Historical Society. He
roped her into volunteering, she said—and the rest is local history.
Back in 1982, when
Johnson arrived, the society consisted of two file cabinets. Today,
dozens of file cabinets, photos and clippings have taken over the
entire top floor of the Town Office building.
“I started asking
people questions, and everything just seemed to grow from there,”
Johnson said. “It was at the time that many people were beginning to
look for their family roots.
“I was a
Crabtree,” she continued. “My mother had been the town’s tax
collector and treasurer for years. Of course, she knew everybody.
And people just assumed that I knew all that she knew.”
She had to turn to
local accounts to get up to speed—and quickly found many
inaccuracies in what had been written about Hancock through the
years.
She backed up her
own research with trips to the Fifth District courthouse for probate
and land records. One thing she discovered, to her dismay, was that
many deeds had not been recorded.
“I have spent 15
years trying to determine exactly who Stephen Young, one of my
ancestors, was,” Johnson said.
“Now we think he
was a deserter in the Revolutionary War. He was listed in the 1803
assignment of properties, so he was a settler here before Hancock
was a town.”
For all Johnson
knows about Hancock and Sullivan, she has no interest in writing a
definitive book. She simply enjoys working with individuals who are
keen to learn more about their families. She also enjoys giving
localized talks to various other historical societies.
She has taken time
to submit articles for the Maine Genealogical Society’s publication,
the Maine Family 1790 series. (1790 was the first year for the
federal census).
Two of her family
profiles (Agreen Crabtree and Stephen Young, both of Hancock) have
been accepted for publication and two more are being considered
(John Johnson and Samuel Bean, both of Sullivan).
“It’s difficult
because they only listed the head of household until 1850,” she
said. “That’s why it’s very important to try to identify these 1790
families: who they were, where they came from, whom they married.
“It is
time-consuming, but it is tremendously valuable. And these were the
family histories that were getting lost.”
The Hancock
Historical Society was organized in 1979, one year after the town
marked its sesquicentennial.
Johnson’s interests
in Hancock aren’t limited to its past. She has been a part of the
town’s five-member school board for 13 years. She wants to finish
out the next two years. Then, “I’ll give way to someone younger.”
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