Hannah Plato Johnson and the Siege of Fort Erie

There’s a truism in genealogy that every family story has a grain of truth in it. My mother always told me her great-great-grandmother Hannah Plato Johnson carried water for the soldiers at Fort Erie in the War of 1812 when she was a little girl. When I was little I cherished this tale since it showed you didn’t have to be an adult to help your country. I was really proud of her.

Well, Hannah Plato probably did carry water to soldiers during the Siege of Fort Erie, but not to my countrymen. She helped the British, not the Americans.

Hannah’s parentage had always been a challenge. What little the family knew came from her daughter Sophia, who married Ebenezer Felton on May 6, 1845. At least that’s what they wrote in their family Bible. They came from upstate New York, near Buffalo. Sophia’s father, Jacob Johnson, was supposed to have been a politician there. Ebenezer’s parents supposedly died young and he was raised by a family friend, Richard Graham. 

Hannah and her husband Jacob

The information was sketchy as my Grandma’s sister made notes at her grandfather Felton’s funeral in 1903. By then Hannah had been dead 40 years. Sophia bore and raised 15 children and had lost touch with her aunts and uncles decades before. (My research showed Hannah’s six children scattered long before she died.) Ever since that funeral various Felton family members have tried to trace Hannah, including Mom. I have copies of the letters she wrote to & received from her aunts and cousins. I made my first tries in 2004, when I visited Aunt Vivian.

In the summer of 2014 I wrote a post on RootsWeb asking if anyone had information on a Hannah Plato who carried water to the soldiers at Fort Erie.

Within hours I received a message from Fred Blair, a Canadian 1812-enthusiast, “I am collecting stories about Upper Canadian life during the War of 1812 and am interested in your story about Hannah Plato who carried water to the wounded soldiers at Fort Erie.  She would have been quite young at the time.  This suggests that one or both of her parents were there supervising her.  Do you have any other details about this story?  I suspect that it would have occurred in 1813 or 1814.  Settler’s homes were often taken over as temporary hospitals and possibly the wounded soldiers were billeted in her home which may have been near the fort.”

He told me the British/Canadian militia records show the troops attacking Fort Erie billeted on a farm owned by a Peter Plato on the Niagara peninsula.  After the War Plato filed claims for losses and damages (he wasn’t paid until almost 20 years later).

I wrote Mr. Blair the little I knew and two days later, in one of those random acts of genealogical kindness that ties the community together, Mr. Blair sent me a document that clarified Hannah’s parentage and lineage: Hannah Plato Johnson’s petition to the Crown for a grant of land.

The file included affidavits affirming she was married to Jacob Johnson and was daughter of Peter Plato, UEL. What’s a UEL, you’re wondering. That’s the subject of another post.