Father, William Mark Miller

Born September 18, 1925, to William Lester Miller and Vallee (Williams) Miller on a farm near Oronogo, Missouri (north of Joplin).  He went to school in Alba.

My father had an older brother, Wayne.  Wwayne was lost in WWII.  He was a pilot on a DC-3 flying supplies to the Chinese resistance.  He flew "over the hump", the Himalayan mountains, from India to western China.  His plane went out one day and never came back.  There's a crash site in the mountains that has probably never been found.

His mother, Vallee Williams.  Her father was Mark Williams. Mark was the youngest child of Utah Mormon pioneer, Alexander Williams.  At one time Alexander was the sheriff of Provo County.  But he had a personality conflict with Brigham Young that led to him leaving Utah with his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Dack.  They first moved to Montana and eventually settled in Missouri.

For some reason, the Williams farm was inherited by Vallee and that is where my grandfather and grandmother lived with their children Wayne, William, Eleanor, Patty, and the fraternal twins, Robert and David. 

My grandfather, William Lester Miller, worked in open pit coal mine within walking distance north of the farmstead.  Dad remembers going down in the mine once.  It may have been when his Mom was sick to fetch him out.  After Vallee died, Grandpa Miller didn't work in mines anymore.  Eventually they moved a few miles away to a house that Grandpa built in the nearby unincorporated community of Galesburg.  Grandpa wasn't much of a farmer and preferred work as a carpenter.  Galesburg existed because of a nearby water-powered grain mill on the Spring River.

By the time the family moved there, Dad had gone off to support the war effort by joining the merchant marines.  He was an oiler in engine rooms of freighters that were the occasional target of German U-boats.

My father's older brother, Wayne was lost in WWII.  He was a pilot on a DC-3 flying supplies to the Chinese resistance.  He flew "over the hump", the Himalayan mountains, from India to western China.  His plane went out one day and never came back.  There's a gravestone in a militiary cemetery in Illinois(?) but I'm not sure that the crash site in the mountains was actually found and remains recovered.

There is a chest of drawers built by Mark Williams in the house at Fairland.  Vallee died of appendicitis when Dad was young [when?].  There may be a picture of her around but I may have seen it only once.

Dad's stepmom was Grace Boone Miller.  Grace is the only Grandma Miller I knew.  She worked as a nurse in the hospital at Webb City.  The house at Galesburg was the only Miller grandparents house I ever knew.

My grandfather's brother, Clifford, was married to Vallee's sister.  So both the William Miller and Clifford Miller families were descendants of Alexander Williams.

In my earliest memories of visiting the Miller grandparents house, it was pretty rustic.  There may have been an indoor toilet but the outhouse was still in use.  The water from the kitchen flowed through a ditch out to the garden.  They burned coal in a pot-bellied stove to heat the whole house.  The coal bin was in the basement so we kids were forbidden to ever go down there.  In all my life, I don't think I went into the basement of the house more than a couple times.  Upon visiting the house recently, it's clear that it was quite a modest house.  But in my childhood memories, it had plenty of room.

In September, 2012, Heidi and I were able to visit the private disused overgrown cemetery where Alexander and Elizabeth were buried.  Alexander died at 73 years of age and Mark was just a baby at the time.  The farmstead lies just east of highway 43.  The cemetery doesn't lie on farmstead land but just southwest of it in a grove of trees.  Someday, it would be nice if the family could work with the current landowners, who have graciously respected the burial site, to build some sort of durable structure around it to help preserve it for future generations.  These private cemeteries are just forgotten and plowed over when there is no one around that cares for them.