Person:John Miller (384)

Oral Traditions

The family Bible records show the name is John Irwin Miller, but we understand that he used the name John E. Miller on his legal papers. He was in Adams township of Darke County, Ohio in his parents home in 1850. In 1860, he was still in his parents home in Marion township of Harrison County, Missouri. By 1870 he was counted in the James P. Anderson household in Marion township of Harrison County, Missouri. In December of 1870 he was married to a neighbor girl, Amanda Jane Brown, daughter of Anthony and Rachel Brown.

The married couple made their home in the now defunct town of Lorraine, MO which later became Ridgeway. The children born to them in Missouri were all born in the village that John later operated a blacksmith shop in his later years. His picture appears in the Ridgeway History, Vol. 1 by Elmer Rinehart.

Sometime after the birth of their son, John Jr., in 1881 the family left Missouri. They lived a year on Cherokee land in Oklahoma Territory. This was not to John's liking, and so he moved back north. The family wandered about for some time. They lived briefly in Harlen County, Nebraska. During one of these treks they were in a wagon train with much sickness, and so they took up a homestead northwest of Colby, Kansas, rather than continue on. On this homestead, Amanda Jane died in childbirth March 28, 1886. She was buried the next day in an unmarked grave in Beulah cemetery in Colby, in the part designated as the Potter's Field.

The oldest child and only living daughter kept house and tended the younger children. She married the bachelor neighbor of the young Miller boys. The boys (Tony, Charles, George and John) then "batched". John E. Miller took a job with the railroad, where he was gone two weeks at a time. He would bring home supplies and give the orders for chores to be done in his absence. The children burned cow chips for fuel (a practice remembered by Vera Miller during the Great Depression).

One day John E. brought home a bride and two step-children. The Miller boys eyed her impishly and began making her life so miserable that she left - gladly. There were no children from this second marriage.

John E. may have taken his sons up to Hitchcock, Nebraska to be with his mother, Elizabeth, as Charles Miller told his granddaughter, Emma Jean Wood (the source of this account) that he grew to manhood in Nebraska. Soon after her death, John and his sons returned to Harrison County, Missouri. By December, 1893, the oldest son married in neighboring Taylor County, Indiana.

August 15, 1894, John E. Miller married his third wife, Maggie Benson, in Harrison County. Missouri. They had two children, Elmer and Fannie.

It's not clear when John E. got the wandering feet again, but he headed west and lived among his first family in Colby, Kansas, as well as Tony Miller in Nebraska, and George on his homestead in Holyoke, Colorado. John E. Miller lived with his daughter Minnie Carpenter at the time of his death, and is buried in Beulah Cemetery in Colby Kansas. His marker gives no date of death.

Burial

John is buried at Beulah Cemetery, Colby, Kansas.

External links

John Erwin Miller burial at Find A Grave.

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5} Vera Louise Miller Bastin's Family Genealogy Notes, 1963 - Present.
2. ↑ ^2.0 2.1 John Erwin Miller, in Find A Grave.

   Beulah Cemetery, Colby, Thomsa, Kansas