OooO, Joe. Could this be a match made in (wiki) heaven?

It's Miller-time.

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 alphabet soup names--Samuel, Henry, John, William, Daniel, Levi and, and ....

And then there was Joseph

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 collaborate about whether "their Joseph" was "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 otherwise be "Joseph Miller, b. 1814," the son of Peter Miller (?1779-1845).

Joseph Peter Miller, b. 1814

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

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

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 and sold some land at Paris Township  in the 1830s--land located not far from Rebecca's father's farm.

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

In the earlier work (ca1954), John I. Miler 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."


According to early census records, there were several men named Peter Miller who settled at Stark County, Ohio.

There were several Joseph Millers about the area of Stark County, too. At least eleven other men by that name married at Stark County between 1834 and 1850.


Perhaps another Peter Miller had settled there by 1814, when Joseph Peter Miller was born, had sons "Jefferson and Silas," or maybe a different Joseph Miller had other, more familiar kinship circumstance.

While Jack Stover's Joseph Peter Miller "might" have been the same man as Peter’s son Joseph, there were too many conflicts in the direct and circumstantial evidence that we could not resolve in 1999.

Stover's Saga: "These Millers are driving me crazy" 

Jack Stover continued to conduct research about his ancestor, Joseph Peter Miller. We did too, but our independent work became more and more complicated by extended Miller kinships--Millers known related by marriage to either Peter Miller (?1779-1845) or Joseph Peter Miller (1814-1895).

"These Millers are driving me crazy." --Jack Stover, 2010

First, Peter Miller's sister-in-law, Susannah Kimmerling (the sister of Peter Miller's first wife, Rosanna Kimmerling), was married about 1800 to Anthony Miller (1780-1864). Anthony and Susannah lived at Columbiana County, Ohio, but some of their many children settled at Paris Township, Stark County, or intermarried with families settled there.

Also, Joseph Peter Miller's sister-in-law, Catherine Thoma, married 1842 to Emanuel Miller, not known to be related to either Peter Miller or Anthony Miller.  Emanuel and Catherine Miller, too, resided Stark County.

And then there were the claimants. A third party speculated Peter Miller's son Joseph was born in 1815 and died 1858 at Porter County, Indiana; married Hannah Burger. This Joseph Miller was almost certainly not Peter's son, but the claim found its way to “share-and-share-alike or prove-me-wrong” trees posted by well-meaning souls on the Internet.  And it spread. And spread.

Frustration grew and two years ago a few of us agreed to develop a new research plan and take a fresh approach to the evidence about Jack's ancestor, Joseph Peter Miller and Peter Miller's son Joseph. We created a wiki and thus set out to determine Joseph Peter Miller’s link to parents and/or whether Peter Miller's son, Joseph, b. 1814, could be better identified.

A summary of our work to solve this OooO Joe! Miller-mystery will follow in four articles, as below:

Part 1 Joseph Peter Miller takes a bride
Part 2 Sticky Dates and Aha! Moments
Part 3 "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"
Part 4 Stories of Christmas Past