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A box of old photos of family members that Angela Johnson and her mother, Liz Brewer, found at Liz’s Ōrewa home started a voyage of discovery for the pair.
They found the box while sharing lockdown, last year.
Wondering who those people were led Angela to contact relatives in the UK, and search the internet for clues. It is an ongoing process of discovering many things about her family’s past – but in particular she found she had a first cousin (three times removed, on her mother’s side) whose life 100 years ago had many parallels with her own.
That distant cousin is Elisabeth Augusta Chant, born in 1865 in Yeovil, England. Elisabeth’s family moved to Minnesota when she was a child. She trained as a nurse, but in 1899 she left nursing to follow her passion for art – making a modest living by exhibiting and selling her work as well as teaching.
“It was mind blowing,” Angela says. “I have been painting all my life and, until now, I thought I was unique in our family.”
Not only that – there were some uncanny parallels, including a striking family resemblance, and that Elizabeth is Angela’s middle name.
“I now know why it’s in my DNA to paint!” Elisabeth has been recognised as one of the best women painters in North Carolina, and a large collection of her work – 170 pieces – are held by the Cameron Art Museum.
Angela says the more she read about Elisabeth, the closer she felt to her.
Angela was in the Navy, and Elisabeth worked for the Red Cross as an Army nurse – while doing these jobs, both continued painting whenever they could. They both studied art and spent time in Japan.
Their works also have similarities – the use of gold leaf gilding, bold, bright colours, painting outdoors, making art cards and loving to create large scale pieces.
While living in the UK, Angela painted a bridge over the Avon in Bath.
“Bath felt so familiar,” she says. “Now I know that Elisabeth sketched that same bridge – and we did it 100 years apart, in 1902 and 2002.”
Discovering this creative relative, at the age of 44, has explained a lot, Angela says, in particular her strong drive to make art.
She has a box filled to overflowing with documents and images she has collated and more information about her family tree is coming in all the time.
“Every week my mum and I are discovering more and more,” she says. “We’ve gone down a rabbit hole and it’s been fascinating. I have managed to reach out to our extended family and begin to catch up on the past and present. They were all as surprised as I am.”
