ANCESTORS OF CHRISTOPHER FARR & ELIZABETH GILBERT
Roots in Linconshire Pt 3 - Christopher Farr & the Johnson Family
This story is part 3 of my family line that lived in Lincolnshire until Christopher and Elizabeth Farr migrated to Australia. It includes the stories of the Johnson family back to the late 1700s. I recommend you read part 1 and part 2 prior to reading this family story.
Settlement and Survival
My fourth great-grandparents, Christopher Farr Senior and Mary Johnson, lived through the sweeping changes of the British Agricultural Revolution — a transformation that reshaped not only the land they worked but the very rhythms of rural life. Born in 1767, Christopher witnessed the enclosure of open fields, the introduction of new crop rotations, and the steady march toward scientific farming. Mary, baptized in 1782 at All Saints Church in Benington, came from sturdy Lincolnshire agricultural stock — a family whose names appear in parish registers generation after generation, their lives measured in harvests and baptisms, in debts paid and children buried.
Together, their marriage anchored a family rooted in more than a century of hard-won local knowledge. But their story is not one of triumph over adversity in the heroic sense. It is quieter than that, and in its quietness, more truthful: a story of survival, of practical choices made in the face of relentless loss, and of a woman who outlived two husbands, buried multiple children, suffered the loss of two grandchildren murdered by a family member, and held her household together as the world around her changed beyond recognition.
The Move from Minting to Benington
As mentioned in the previous story of Anne Timberland and John Farr, Christopher's parents secured a settlement certificate in 1786 and moved the family from Minting to Benington. But what lay behind that move?
The 1662 Act of Settlement governed the movement of England's poor. To relocate from one parish to another — even a distance of only twenty miles — a family needed a certificate from their home parish guaranteeing they would be taken back if they ever fell into poverty and required relief. Without such a document, they could be forcibly removed. The certificate was simultaneously a permission slip, an insurance policy, and a statement of intent: We will not become your burden.
The move from Minting to Benington was not merely a change of address. Minting, perched on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, was a sheep-and-barley parish of thin soils and modest prospects. The Wolds were ancient countryside — rolling chalk hills where flocks grazed and the land yielded reluctantly to the plough. Benington, by contrast, lay in the rich marshland east of Boston — a landscape of deep, dark soils reclaimed from the sea, where innovative farmers were experimenting with new crop rotations and the cultivation of flax and hemp. The air was different here: heavier, damp, freighted with the smell of silt and salt. But the earth gave generously.
For an ambitious family with young children, the direction of opportunity was clear: downhill and eastward, toward the fat lands of the Holland division. Benington's population reflected this pull — growing from 362 residents in 1801 to 603 by 1851, a 66% increase in a single generation. That growth meant work, and work meant survival.
Marriage and Early Years
Christopher Farr Senior married Mary Johnson on 13 October 1801 at All Saints Church, Benington. Both were recorded as "single".
The witnesses to the marriage were Mark Johnson (either Mary's father, born around 1751 or her brother born in 1798) and Anne Johnson.
Mark Johnson & Elizabeth Hewitt
Mary's parents had married twenty-one years earlier, on 15 May 1780, at St Mary's Church in Broughton by Brigg — a groom from Benington marrying a bride from beyond its boundaries. Their witnesses, John Smith and John Hunter, have left no further trace in the records.
Mark and Elizabeth Johnson had at least eight children, though as was so often the case, not all survived:
• Mary (1782–1863) — our ancestor
• Mark (1785–86)
• Elizabeth (1787–?)
• Thomas (1790–1791)
• John (1792–1827)
• Sarah (1795–?)
• Mark (1798–1882)
The loss of little Anne, Thomas, and Mark in infancy was a reminder of how fragile life was for people of this period — especially the rural poor. The death of young children was a grief so common that it rarely earned more than a single line in the parish register. Yet each death left its mark.
Mary's mother, Elizabeth, was buried at All Saints Church on 18 November 1826 at the age of seventy-four. Her father, Mark, lived longer — dying at eighty-seven on 8 February 1838, long enough to see his daughter Mary widowed, remarried, and widowed again.
Life in Leverton: The Cottage on Church End
After their marriage, Christopher and Mary settled in the neighbouring parish of Leverton, a village that would remain the geographic heart of their family for generations.
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| Aerial Photo of Leverton. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Leverton,_Lincolnshire |
Leverton sits on the edge of the Lincolnshire marshlands, roughly four miles east of Boston. Its name derives from the Old English Lēofhere-tūn — "the farmstead of Lēofhere" — and by the early nineteenth century it was a scattering of red-brick cottages, farmsteads, and the medieval tower of St Helen's Church, a landmark visible across the flat fields for miles. Unlike the nucleated villages of the Midlands, Leverton was a "dispersed" settlement: clusters of houses along Church End, Main Road, and the aptly-named Poor Row, separated by ditches and drainage channels that kept the arable land from reverting to fen. In 1801, the parish recorded 298 inhabitants; by 1831, the year of Christopher's death, the population had grown to 430. The parish's economy rested on mixed farming — wheat, barley, beans, and sheep — but the surrounding fens provided peat for fuel, wildfowl for the pot, and eels for both eating and sale. For the Farr family, Leverton offered what Minting and Benington could not: a foothold, however precarious, on land that was being steadily improved by drainage and enclosure.
Their cottage — likely one of the small, lime-mortared dwellings that still line the road to Church End — reflected modest progress. Its walls were plastered and whitewashed, a bread oven was built into the chimney breast, and glass windows admitted clear light where oiled cloth or shutters would once have served. These were not luxuries but markers of slow, hard-won improvement.
The year of their marriage, 1801, was also the year Britain and France agreed to an uneasy peace. But the peace shattered, and for most of Christopher's working life — from 1803 to 1815 — Britain was at war with Napoleonic France. For rural Lincolnshire, the war meant rising demand for grain to feed the army and navy, but it also meant rising prices. A labourer's wage might buy a loaf of bread one week and only half the next. Parishes tried to bridge the gap with the so-called "Speenhamland" system — a dole tied to the cost of bread — but it was a patchwork solution, unevenly applied and universally resented by rate-paying farmers. Christopher and Mary raised their first children under the shadow of war and the threat of hunger.
Yet daily life retained its ancient rhythms. The hearth glowed as Mary brewed small beer — a weak, slightly fermented drink safer than water — spun wool into yarn, and prepared meals from the garden: cabbages, leeks, onions, potatoes after they became common in English diets around the turn of the century. Meat was occasional — bacon perhaps once a week, a rabbit snared illegally if one was lucky, eels from the nearby drainage channels that laced the marshland. Bread was the staff of life, baked weekly in the communal village oven or in the cottage's own bread oven if they were fortunate enough to afford the fuel.
A Parliamentary Commission report from 1843 — just a decade after Christopher's death — described such cottages with unsparing accuracy:
"The agricultural labourer's cottage is generally small, ill-ventilated, and damp. The furniture is of the scantiest description. The diet consists chiefly of bread, cheese, bacon, and potatoes, with tea as the universal beverage."
The mention of tea is telling. By Mary's middle years, tea had become universal among the rural poor — not as an indulgence but as a necessity. Boiling water for tea killed pathogens, and the tea itself provided a stimulant to labourers beginning work before dawn. Sugar, added sparingly, offered calories cheaply. A family like the Farrs would have brewed their tea weak, reusing the leaves multiple times.
Setback and Recovery: The 1807 Assignment
In June 1807, a notice appeared in the Stamford Mercury that may transform our understanding of Christopher Farr — or may point to a different man altogether. It announced that Christopher Farr, late of Leverton, Farmer, had on 14 May 1807 executed a deed assigning all his personal estate and effects to two trustees: Robert Plant of Boston, Gentleman, and Mark Johnson of Benington, Yeoman.
The purpose was "in trust for the benefit of all creditors of the said Christopher Farr as should execute the said deed in proportion to their respective debts."
If this Christopher Farr is our ancestor — and the name, location, and connection to Mark Johnson strongly suggest he is — then he was not a humble labourer but a tenant farmer, a man who rented land, employed labourers, and owned sufficient assets to be worth assigning. The notice reveals a man who had climbed above his labouring origins, only to fail. Yet he recovered sufficiently to live another twenty-four years, dying in his own home in 1831.
Parish records from 1787 describe a Mark Johnson (likely Mary's father) as a pauper when his daughter Elizabeth was baptised. How, then, could the same man be described as a "Yeoman" twenty years later, trusted to manage his son-in-law's financial collapse?
There are two possibilities. First, the trustee may have been a different Mark Johnson — perhaps a cousin or an unrelated man of the same name. Second, "pauper" was a legal classification that did not necessarily mean complete destitution. A family might receive occasional parish relief during a bad harvest or illness, yet recover and regain standing over time.
I intend to investigate this further at a later date and will update this story when new information is found.
Whatever the truth, the 1807 notice adds a layer of complexity to the Farr family story. Christopher was not merely a witness to the Agricultural Revolution — he was an active participant who rose, fell, and carried on. And Mark Johnson, whether a yeoman or labourer, lived until 1838, long enough to see his daughter through widowhood and beyond.
Thirteen Children, Inevitable Losses
Between 1803 and 1826, Mary bore at least thirteen children. The register of St Helen's Church, Leverton, records their arrivals in a steady rhythm:
2. Elizabeth (1803–?)
3. John (1805–?)
4. William (1807–1858) — died in Gedney
5. Ann (1809–1827) — died at eighteen
6. Thomas (1811–?)
7. Christopher (1815–1885) — our ancestor, who would migrate to Australia
8. James (1816–1875)
9. Joseph (1817–1898)
10. Sarah (1819–1885)
11. George (1821–1903)
12. Mary (1824–1825) — died at seven months
13. Susannah (1826–1907)
Alongside these births came inevitable losses. Young Anne died in 1805 at just three years old — perhaps from one of the childhood fevers that swept through villages: scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, or simply a bad winter and a weakened constitution. The infant Mary died in 1825 at only seven months, her short life marked by a single entry in the register. And Ann — named for her lost older sister — died in 1827 at eighteen years old, on the cusp of adulthood, her future erased.
In early 19th-century England, between 15 and 20 percent of children died before their fifth birthday. Mary's experience — losing at least four of her thirteen children — was tragically unexceptional. But no statistical average lessens the weight of a child's coffin. The parish register records their names in the same steady hand as their baptisms. The space between the two entries is the space of a family's quiet mourning — a grief so common that it rarely earned more than a line, yet so profound that it shaped every parent who endured it. Mary would carry the names of her lost children to her own grave, sixty-two years after Anne died, fifty-eight years after Mary the infant, thirty-six years after Ann.
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| An engraving from Stephen Lewin’s book of churches in the Holland Division of Lincolnshire (1843). (https://slha.org.uk/catalogue_item/leverton-st-helen-3) |
Christopher's Death and Mary's Widowhood
Christopher Farr Senior was buried on 10 December 1831 at St Helen, Leverton. He was sixty-four years old.
Christopher died just over a year after the Swing Riots had convulsed rural England. In the autumn of 1830, labourers across Lincolnshire had gathered in market towns, demanding better wages and smashing the new threshing machines that robbed them of winter work. Benington and Leverton were not among the riot's epicentres — that grim honour belonged to Threekingham, just fifteen miles west, where a mob destroyed seven machines — but the fear travelled everywhere. Special constables were sworn in. Magistrates read the Riot Act. By Christmas 1830, nineteen men had been hanged and nearly five hundred sentenced to transportation. Whether Christopher himself sympathised with the rioters or feared them, we cannot know. But he could not have been untouched. The old certainties of rural life were breaking apart.
In rural Lincolnshire, widowhood was a specific kind of disaster — but also a specific kind of liberation. A married woman worked continuously: in the fields at harvest, in domestic service, spinning, sewing, caring for livestock. Mary herself would have joined the seasonal labour of gleaning, weeding, and haymaking alongside her neighbours. But under the legal doctrine of coverture, any wages she earned belonged technically to her husband. She could not sign contracts, own property in her own name, or claim parish relief independently. Widowhood restored her legal personhood — she could keep what she earned, apply for relief in her own right, and be recognised as a householder. But this freedom came at a harsh cost: unless she could remarry quickly or her surviving children were old enough to work alongside her, the parish workhouse beckoned.
A labourer from the Lincolnshire fens, interviewed in the 1880s, captured the desperation that drove families like the Farrs:
"I brought up a family and nearly worked them to death. They said, 'Father, we are not going to stop here and be worked to death for nothing', so they went off and left me and the old woman to struggle along. When they were here they got no wages, and now they're ladies and gentlemen."
Mary's children did not abandon her — census records show that James and Sarah were still residing with her decades later. But some would naturally begin their own families. And one of them, Christopher Jnr, would leave not just Lincolnshire but England itself, for a fresh start — leaving scandal, tragedy, and poverty behind.
A Widow's Calculation
Mary was forty-nine years old when she buried her husband of thirty years. Five children were still at home: James (15), Joseph (14), Sarah (12), George (10), and little Susannah (5). Elizabeth (28) and Thomas (20) had already left to establish households of their own. Christopher Jnr (16) was on the cusp of manhood. The household's primary wage-earner was gone. But Mary had something that many widows lacked: surviving sons old enough to work. James and George would soon find labour on neighbouring farms. Sarah, when the season demanded, could join the gangs of field women, wielding a hoe or gathering stones. The family would not starve — but they would not thrive either. Every shilling would count.
Mary did not wait long to remarry. Less than a year after Christopher's death, in the autumn of 1832, she married Daniel Johnson (1779–1835), a widower from the same parish with children of his own. It was a practical alliance, as most remarriages were among the rural poor: Mary gained a male labourer's wages and protection; Daniel gained a woman to manage his household and raise his children.
But the marriage brought an extraordinary entanglement. Daniel had a daughter from his first marriage — also named Mary Johnson — and Mary Farr had a son, Christopher Farr Junior. In 1834, just two years after their parents' wedding, the younger Mary and Christopher married. This meant that Mary Farr (now Mary Johnson) became simultaneously her daughter-in-law's stepmother and mother-in-law — a genealogical knot that parish clerks recorded without comment, too familiar in small villages to raise eyebrows.
Daniel Johnson died in 1835, after barely three years of marriage. Mary was widowed for the second time at fifty-three. She never remarried.
The Census Years: Poor Row and Church End
The census records of 1841, 1851, and 1861 trace Mary's later life with remarkable clarity — and reveal a household that refused to dissolve.
1841: Poor Row, Leverton
In 1841, Mary was living at Poor Row, Leverton, described as a "pauper" aged 55. But the household was far from empty. With her lived:
• James (25), agricultural labourer
• Sarah (20)
• George (20), agricultural labourer
• Susannah (14)
• Eliza (5) — almost certainly the illegitimate daughter of Mary's brother Mark, not Mary's own child
Also on Poor Row, in a separate dwelling, lived her son Thomas (30), an agricultural labourer, with his wife Sarah (nee Edwards) and their young family. The street — its name a blunt advertisement of its residents' status — was home to a network of Farrs and Johnsons, supporting one another as best they could.
1851: Church End, Leverton
By 1851, Mary was at Church End, Leverton, described as "Head, widow, pauper". Her household had contracted but remained intact:
• James (34), agricultural labourer, unmarried
• Sarah (29), unmarried daughter
Her niece Eliza was no longer living with her, but was reunited with her father. His wife Mary accepted the illegitimate daughter into their household. Thomas was still nearby, living at Church End also, raising his own family. Christopher Jnr, by this time, was already in South Australia.
1861: Church End, Leverton
In 1861, Mary was eighty years old and still at Church End. The household now consisted of:
• James (45), farm labourer, unmarried
• Sarah (39), field labourer, unmarried
The census enumerator recorded Sarah's occupation as "field labourer" — a reminder that rural women worked the land alongside men, their labour essential to the family's survival. James and Sarah's combined wages kept the small household afloat. Mary herself, too old now for field work, would have managed the cottage, tended the garden, and perhaps watched the younger children of neighbours.
The Matriarch's Death
Mary died in April 1863 at the age of eighty-one. She was buried in the churchyard of St Helen's, Leverton, among generations of Farrs whose names the registers hold.
She had survived two husbands, buried at least four of her own children, and also buried her two murdered grandchildren — Daniel and Christopher Farr — weathering the family scandal of the poisoning trials. She had lived long enough to see her son Christopher build a new life in South Australia — though whether any letter crossed the oceans to tell her of his survival, we do not know.
Her final years, spent in poverty despite a lifetime of labour, epitomised the precarious existence of agricultural families in Victorian England. Yet "pauper" is a legal classification, not a measure of a life. Mary maintained her household for decades after her second husband's death. She kept her children close. She worked, and they worked alongside her, until her body would work no more.
She was not a woman of wealth or status. She was a woman who endured. And in that endurance, she anchored a family that would stretch from the flat fields of Leverton to the distant shores of Australia — carrying her name, her resilience, and her memory across centuries and oceans.
In Part four of this story, we will follow her son Christopher Farr Junior and his second wife, Elizabeth Gilbert. Christopher refused to let tragedy and scandal become his legacy. He decided to start a new life with his new wife in a new colony. In death he was not remembered as the man whose two children were murdered by his lover or step-daughter, but as a colonist who was mourned by his wife and six surviving children.
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