letter sent more than fifty years ago by one of my father’s aunts. And across the first page he had written, “Have you ever heard of the Battle of the Boyne? See page 9.”
The dozen typed pages focus on one branch, the Millers, revealing a mere trickle of our own family’s journey and only a drop or two in the stream of the great Scots-Irish migration. But they give us human faces and comment on personal tendencies, thus allowing an honest window into the distant past. Henry Miller, born in Londonderry in 1726, came to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1745, where he married Rebecca Boggs, also a native of Ireland. In 1770 they migrated to Rockbridge County, Virginia, along with a group of closely knit Northern Irish families that included the Lackeys, the Leeches, and the McKnights, with whom the Millers intermarried. The family cemetery at which I found Thomas Lackey’s and others’ graves is near the old Miller homestead, as is a church that was reportedly built on land donated in part by Henry Miller.
Other details abound in these simple pages, showing us a people impelled by the inescapable momentum of a larger political history that finds its way so dryly into little-read textbooks, living the hardships that we objectively describe through footnotes and excerpts from the speeches of great statesmen, affected by political events rather than controlling them. We are reminded that even in colonial Virginia “no churches except the Church of England were allowed by law, but in order to make the Presbyterian frontier settlers contented to live there and be a buffer between the Indians and the coast towns, they were allowed to build their churches—but only in the country.” There is mention of the “horrible Indian massacres” that broke out in the settlements along the mountain regions of Pennsylvania and Virginia after 1754 and continued for years thereafter.
We learn little things about long-dead people. That John Miller loved fine horses, priding himself in a silver-mounted harness, and eventually left Virginia by himself, disappearing into Kentucky. That William Miller, my four-times-great-grandfather, fought as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, including at the famous Battle of Cowpens. That every farm had its own distillery, and that Samuel Miller, another ancestor, “was inclined to drink more than he should.” And that his wife “saw that it was an evil in their house, so she closed the distillery.”
And on page 9 of the typed version of a letter written long, long ago, my father’s aunt introduces us to her mother—my great-great-grandmother—Rebecca Miller. Born in the remote wilderness of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains in 1825, Rebecca had filled her daughter with stories of her own grandmother, Margaret Lackey.
The House of Ochiltree
mentions the Millers as having “distinguished themselves in the terrible siege of Londonderry,” a high honor to be singled out among so many courageous people, and the aunt’s letter confirms how deeply those memories had burned into the progeny of those who had survived. “Their ancestors had been in the Siege of Londonderry, and my Mother said she had often heard her grandmother Margaret Lackey Miller tell the stories of that time, and sing the song of ‘The Battle of the Boyne’ in a most dramatic and thrilling manner. She would sometimes get quite excited in describing the sufferings and courage of her people in the Siege of Londonderry.”
All this written no doubt from an obscure farm in Missouri by a woman in her later years, now reflecting on the memories of her mother telling the stories she herself had learned from a grandmother while sitting before the fireplace in the near-dark of a Virginia cabin within a few miles of what we now call the Appalachian Trail. Voice to voice, before my eyes I am transferred back six generations and am looking back several generations further, to the remembered tragedies in Northern Ireland that both
The dozen typed pages focus on one branch, the Millers, revealing a mere trickle of our own family’s journey and only a drop or two in the stream of the great Scots-Irish migration. But they give us human faces and comment on personal tendencies, thus allowing an honest window into the distant past. Henry Miller, born in Londonderry in 1726, came to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1745, where he married Rebecca Boggs, also a native of Ireland. In 1770 they migrated to Rockbridge County, Virginia, along with a group of closely knit Northern Irish families that included the Lackeys, the Leeches, and the McKnights, with whom the Millers intermarried. The family cemetery at which I found Thomas Lackey’s and others’ graves is near the old Miller homestead, as is a church that was reportedly built on land donated in part by Henry Miller.
Other details abound in these simple pages, showing us a people impelled by the inescapable momentum of a larger political history that finds its way so dryly into little-read textbooks, living the hardships that we objectively describe through footnotes and excerpts from the speeches of great statesmen, affected by political events rather than controlling them. We are reminded that even in colonial Virginia “no churches except the Church of England were allowed by law, but in order to make the Presbyterian frontier settlers contented to live there and be a buffer between the Indians and the coast towns, they were allowed to build their churches—but only in the country.” There is mention of the “horrible Indian massacres” that broke out in the settlements along the mountain regions of Pennsylvania and Virginia after 1754 and continued for years thereafter.
We learn little things about long-dead people. That John Miller loved fine horses, priding himself in a silver-mounted harness, and eventually left Virginia by himself, disappearing into Kentucky. That William Miller, my four-times-great-grandfather, fought as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, including at the famous Battle of Cowpens. That every farm had its own distillery, and that Samuel Miller, another ancestor, “was inclined to drink more than he should.” And that his wife “saw that it was an evil in their house, so she closed the distillery.”
And on page 9 of the typed version of a letter written long, long ago, my father’s aunt introduces us to her mother—my great-great-grandmother—Rebecca Miller. Born in the remote wilderness of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains in 1825, Rebecca had filled her daughter with stories of her own grandmother, Margaret Lackey.
The House of Ochiltree
mentions the Millers as having “distinguished themselves in the terrible siege of Londonderry,” a high honor to be singled out among so many courageous people, and the aunt’s letter confirms how deeply those memories had burned into the progeny of those who had survived. “Their ancestors had been in the Siege of Londonderry, and my Mother said she had often heard her grandmother Margaret Lackey Miller tell the stories of that time, and sing the song of ‘The Battle of the Boyne’ in a most dramatic and thrilling manner. She would sometimes get quite excited in describing the sufferings and courage of her people in the Siege of Londonderry.”
All this written no doubt from an obscure farm in Missouri by a woman in her later years, now reflecting on the memories of her mother telling the stories she herself had learned from a grandmother while sitting before the fireplace in the near-dark of a Virginia cabin within a few miles of what we now call the Appalachian Trail. Voice to voice, before my eyes I am transferred back six generations and am looking back several generations further, to the remembered tragedies in Northern Ireland that both
Similar Books
