Ancestors

Christina Addison Hanna

Christina Addison Hanna was born on 22 July 1857 at Chester, in Randolph County, Illinois. Her father, Benjamin J. F. Hanna, was a newspaperman. He had founded the Chester Herald in 1849 and was then editing the Alton Courier. Her mother, Margaret Phillips, had come from Paisley in Scotland as a girl. Christina carried the name of her mother's mother, Christiana Addison Phillips, and was probably named for her.

She was the third of five children. Her brother Franklin died in March 1857, four months before she was born, aged two and a half. Her older brother Edwin and her younger brother Benjamin both became private secretaries to cabinet officers in Washington. Her younger sister Lucie married B. F. Morgan of WaKeeney.

In November 1862 President Lincoln appointed her father a quartermaster of volunteers, and he was away with the army until January 1866. Her mother then took the children to Salina, Kansas, a frontier town that Margaret's brother William Addison Phillips had founded in 1858. Christina's grandmother Christiana Phillips lived there too. After the war her father founded the Salina Herald, whose first issue came out on 16 February 1867.

At Salina, on Christmas Day 1876, she married William Henry Dann, a young Englishman who had come to Kansas by way of St. Louis. That date comes from Cutler's History of the State of Kansas, published in 1883 in her father's lifetime; a West Virginia county history of 1898 says 1875. In November 1877 her father became Register of the U.S. Land Office at Hays City, and in 1879 the office moved to WaKeeney. The 1880 census has Christina and William at WaKeeney, in the same township as her parents, with William working as a clerk in her father's office.

Five of her children were born in Kansas: Albert Edwin in 1877, William Christie in 1879, Margaret Elizabeth in 1881, Annie Ethel in 1884 and Benjamin George at WaKeeney in April 1894. When her father died in Washington in December 1891, his death notice said he left "two daughters living in Kansas." Christina and Lucie were those two daughters.

After 1894 the family moved to Elkins, West Virginia, where her husband kept a hardware store and was elected City Recorder in 1897. The 1898 history of Randolph County calls her the "daughter of Captain and Mrs. B. J. P. Hanna," misprinting one of her father's initials. Her last child, Christine, was born at Elkins on 11 July 1899. The 1900 census lists Christina there, born July 1857 in Illinois. By 1910 the family had moved to Beltsville, Maryland, outside Washington.

Christina Addison Dann died in 1917. She is buried at St. John's Episcopal Church Cemetery in Beltsville, where her stone calls her "Wife of William H. Dann." A rock-faced DANN family monument stands over the plot.

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Cite: Heirology, "Christina Addison Hanna (1857-1917)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/christina-addison-hanna-1857-1917-3818ee.