Hannah's Life
Johanna was always known as Hannah to her family, in fact many members only learnt that her name was Johanna when they saw her birth record. She was a teacher and midwife as her mother and grandmother before her had been. She grew up in Echuca in Victoria. After her father died, when she was about 16, she moved to Melbourne to live at first with her Jewish great aunt and then she worked for the Rabbi of St Kilda Rabbi Elias Blaubaum. She was the nanny/housekeeper for the Rabbis children (two of them were called Athol and Eric). She embraced orthodox Judaism at this stage but after some negative influences she abandoned the synagogue and was a great lover of reading the Bible and she had a deep devotion to the angels (which influenced her granddaughter Laurie when she was a girl). She was a beautiful red head with dark auburn hair (like her mother Anne) and was pursued by the brothers Leonard and Cornelius Lewis. She chose Leonard and was said to have regretted that decision when Leonard moved his mistress into the house with her at one stage. One family member said that Leonard first glimpsed her riding a horse when he was out riding and he followed the beautiful red haired woman. Johanna's parents had moved to Echuca from Geelong (where they were married) because her mother's relatives were farming there. Neither of Johanna and Leonard's mothers approved of the match and they eloped to Wangaratta where they were married in the house of the Wesleyan Methodist minister in 1896. They moved from Corowa to Dumbleyung and then Northcliffe. Hannah used to go by herself with a lantern through the huge Karri tree forest to deliver babies and also to dances late at night. She is said to have loved dancing as do all her descendants. She belongs to the I mt-dna haplogroup (I1a1b mt-dna with T16362C Ashkenazi Jewish marker found only in the I1a1b descendants of Anna and Frances Levy and not other I1a1b descendants) to which only less than 2 percent of Europeans belong. This haplogroup is also called the Iris or Isha group whose more distant origins is in Saudi Arabia and the Hunza Valley of Pakistan.
Gilbert Joseph 
