The Johnstons lived in the island of Coll in the Inner Hebrides from about 1600 until the early twentieth century. In origin they belong to the Clan Iain of Ardnamurchan, a branch of the Clan Donald; the t in their English name is extraneous. Though some settled in mainland Scotland, most of the family removed to British North America between 1819 and the 1850s.
The August 1819 emigration from Coll to Pictou County, Nova Scotia, numbered fifteen or twenty family members: brothers Donald (Arinagour) and Duncan (Grishipoll) Johnston, Donald's children Mary (wife of Sweeney MacKenzie or Matheson) and Hector (piper to Maclean of Coll), Duncan's children Lachlan and Rory, and Mary's and Lachlan's families.
Donald and the MacKenzies went to Cape Breton (a great-grandson was the Hon Daniel D. MacKenzie, PC, KC), while Hector and Rory established the family in Prince Edward Island.
Lachlan and his wife, Sarah or Marion MacKinnon, stayed in Pictou County, where, presumably because of a clerical error, they became Johnsons. Many of their family remain along the North Shore to this day. Others moved across the province: a grandson, Jacob A., was called 'the maker of modern Halifax' in the early 1900s. Another grandson, John, was ancestor of the New Brunswick branch of the family. Other Johnsons went further west, to Alberta (Charles S. Johnson's 1908 homestead is still farmed by the family) and British Columbia, even Vancouver Island.
Murdoch Johnston, a nephew of Donald and Duncan, went to Canada in 1847. He has left the only known first-person immigration account from the family, a story of tragedy overcome by faith. He and two of his brothers (another Duncan and Donald) are ancestors of the Ontario Johnstons.
Yet another of Murdoch's brothers, John, stayed in Coll. His son, also John, the last Johnston permanently resident on the island until his death in 1921, is commemorated by a cairn overlooking Arinagour.
Brendon Johnson is researching the family's history. Though his study focuses on the two centuries of the family's life in Canada, he is also interested in the Johnston story in Scotland, the U.S.A. and beyond.