Born in 1839 her father had grown up hearing stories from the last veteran United Irishmen who had fought at the Battle of Antrim and personally knew a number of Young Irelanders from the 1840s before himself becoming involved in the 1867 Fenian rising. He later oversaw the re-organisation of the IRB in the 1880s and had hosted many of the future readers of the Easter Rising in his Antrim Road home in Belfast. Carbery's husband, the poet and folklorist Seumus MacManus, called Robert Johnston the “"…connecting link that kept the spirit of freedom alive throughout more than a century."”