Mary Elizabeth Swanson (maiden name: Remore) was born around 1837 in Camden, New York, to Peter and Lydia Remore. Her father was a blacksmith who owned $100 of real estate and $340 of personal property by 1860. She married James Swanson around 1855, and they had at least three children: Ella, born around 1856; Isabella, born around 1860; and Minnie, born around 1862.
They lived in Camden, and her husband worked as a sawyer and mechanic. James enlisted in the Union army in August 1862 and died in the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5, 1864. She applied for a widow’s pension in July 1865 and eventually secured one. She married George Johnson sometime in the late 1860s. He worked as a farm laborer, and they owned $200 of personal property by 1870. She developed an “internal tumor” by the late 1870s, and over the “last five years of her life she was a great sufferer.” She underwent surgery in late 1886, “feeling that there was a slight chance to save her life by its removal.” The surgery, however, was unsuccessful, and she died in Rome, New York, on December 2, 1886.