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John Miller of Tijeras, New Mexico, is writing a book about his forebears who emigrated from Scotland to Bovina in 1819. He sent us the chapter about Andrew Miller, the second son of James and Grace Archibald Miller, born in Scotland, in 1814.
Andrew was 32 when he married Christian Scott, whose family came from the same Scottish parish as the Millers. Christian Scott Miller bore seven children on the couple’s New Kingston farmstead. None of them lived to age 20.
A lung ailment claimed seven-year-old James in 1860. On September 30, 1865 contagion claimed two-year-old John, followed within hours by the toddler’s mother, Christian. 15-year-old daughter Grace died six days later. Sons David and William also died in the mid-1860s, before they had entered their teens.
With no boys left to help him worked the farm, Andrew sold 125 acres to his brother Walter, and then remarried Dorothy (Dolly) Swart of New Kingston who helped him raise his two remaining daughters: Mary, who married Andrew Hewitt in 1868, and then passed away seven months later at the age of 20; and Magdalene (Matty), who at age 16 married Reed Dumond, and died in childbirth just two weeks after her 17th birthday.
Andrew had survived his first wife, their children, and all of his siblings when he himself left a sorrow-filled life on New Years Day, 1892 at the age of 84.
John Miller welcomes contact with anyone interested in his genealogical research: celtic@wildblue.net.