OooO, Joe

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: [unknown]

Joseph Peter Miller (1814-1895)
Peter Miller (1779-1845)

Joseph Miller 2012 GeneJ Blog

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Sections/graphics for this article:

OooO, Joe 00-01

OooO, Joseph Miller, born 1814

OooO, Joseph Peter Miller, born 1814

OooO, Joseph vs Joseph Close but Conflicted (two graphics)

OooO, It's Miller Time

Initiating Miller genealogy speak.

Yes, I am a Miller. According to Wikipedia, occurrences of the Miller surname in the 2000 U.S. census earned it the rank as the sixth most common surname in the United States. If that elicits a little smile, know that my cousin, Bill Smith, is also a Miller. (Wikipedia ranked Smith as the top surname in that 2000 census.)

Our Miller line descends of Peter Miller (?1779-1845), who died at Stark County, Ohio. Peter left a will calling out his 12 known children, but Stark County was a popular place then for other, at least mostly unrelated Miller families. Peter Miller lived at Paris township, and his sons were given mostly alphabet soup names. Traces exist about a multitude of age-appropriate Miller men who hailed early from Stark County. Peter's known sons were named Samuel, Henry, John, William, Daniel, Levi and, and ....

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And then there was Joseph.
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Peter Miller married twice, and his son Joseph was the first born of the second marriage, to Mary Stewart [Columbiana County (Ohio) Marriages].

Descendants of Joseph's siblings seemed to have recorded little about him, so the body of evidence that collected for him tended to be brief and repetitive.

We lacked identifying personal information by which a mature Joseph might have been recognized in the 1850 census--just five years beyond the father's death.

Sigh. When corresponding with other researchers hoping to connect "their Joseph" to "our Joseph," the conversations usually began (and generally ended) with an inquiry about a birth date--for which we never found a match.

So it was in 1999 when Jack Stover (Ohio) began to correspond about whether his "Joseph Peter Miller, b. 1814" might have otherwise been "Joseph Miller, b. 1814," the son of Peter Miller (?1779-1845).

Joseph Peter Miller, b. 1814
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Much was known about the identity of Jack Stover's ancestor, Joseph Peter Miller, born 1814.

Thanks to Joseph Peter Miller's descendants, including Jack Stover, we had access to family manuscripts, bibles, marriage, death and cemetery records, deeds, census records and more.

Joseph Peter Miller's wife's name was Rebecca Thoma. They married in 1835 at Stark County--where her parents lived. Joseph Peter Miller had purchased some land at Paris Township, Stark County in 1837--not far from Rebecca's father's farm. Joseph Peter and Rebecca Miller sold that land in 1838.

Joseph Peter and Rebecca (Thoma) Miller's grandson, John I. Miller (1870-1962) wrote two family manuscripts.

In the earlier work (ca1954), he reported that Joseph Peter's father was a Peter Miller, who had a "large family," with sons including Samuel, John, Jefferson and Silas. In the later manuscript, Joseph Peter Miller was said "among eight or ten brothers and five or six sisters."

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There were several men named Peter Miller--perhaps one of the other men had settled at Stark County by 1814 and had sons "Jefferson and Silas" or other, more familiar kinship circumstance.

Although Jack's Joseph Peter Miller seemed like he "might" have been the same man as Peter’s son Joseph, there were too many conflicts that could not be resolved in 1999.

Stover's Saga: "These Miller's are driving me crazy"
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Jack Stover continued to conduct research about his ancestor, Joseph Peter Miller. We did too, and some years later we all agreed to set up a wiki, develop a new research plan and take a fresh approach to the evidence. Thus we set out to determine Joseph Peter Miller’s link to parents and whether we could learn to better identify Peter Miller's son, Joseph, b. 1814.