Jacob Miller 3rd great grandpa on RootsMagic tree

Jacob was born in 1808 in Virginia. On April 18, 1833 in Jackson, Ohio he married Sarah Davis, also from Virginia. They had their first child in Ohio then moved to Elkhart Indiana and had 9 more kids. The 1840 and 1850 US censuses show Jacob and family farmed in Baugo Township, 50 miles east of Lake Michigan, near Elkhart and South Bend, Indiana The red rectangle on the Google map shows the location. The Mitchell family from New York were neighbors in 1850 and on August 7, 1850 Jacob and Sarah’s oldest daughter Mary married Moses Mitchell and they moved to Iowa.

Jacob died in 1854 at age 46 and there’s a pretty good chance he was hit by a train after a night of drinking. The newspaper article (Peru (Indiana) Wabash Valley Olio 1854 Jan 13) shows detail. In 1845 the ‘Temperance’ lobby, movement was pretty well established and continued to grow until prohibition in 1920. When Jacob died, his widow, with 8 kids still at home, one of them just born in 1854, decided to move 400 miles west to Iowa, where her oldest daughter Mary Mitchell and family lived. That move set in motion the marriage of Sarah’s son James to Mary Ella Gaines then the birth of their son William, then William’s marriage and the birth of his son, Faber who married Gladys. Faber’s sister Florence kept family history notes with the names and births of her family including Jacob’s family. Jacob’s kids would set up homes in California, Kansas, Oklahoma and Washington, 3 stayed in Iowa, 3 are currently unknown.

Sources

• 1850 US Census at FamilySearch
• Public Ancestry photo “LanceL_Ferris originally shared this 24 Dec 2013”.
• Newspaper Archive, Cedar Rapids Public Library, Peru (Indiana) Wabash Valley Olio 1854 Jan 13