Miller Family Overview So, let’s set the stage. It’s July 4, 1864 and Wells Waite Miller just married Mary Helen Caswell in her parents’ home in Castalia, Ohio. Wells Waite Miller He’d been badly wounded at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on July 3, 1863 and, on his wedding date, he was fairly new as a member of the Invalid Corps. In this corps, wounded soldiers could contribute to the war effort in “valuable capacities, such as in garrison, as military police, or on clerk duty. This freed as many able-bodied soldiers as possible for frontline service.” I’m still researching what he might

Miller Family Mystery After Wells Waite Miller was seriously wounded on July 3, 1863 at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, there were initially big gaps in my research between that date and 1894 when he became the Secretary of Ohio’s Department of Agriculture. What was he doing, exactly? I’ve slowly filled in those gaps over the past couple of years, but something continued to puzzle me. Why did documentation for his two children (Corinne and Amos Calvin) say they were born in Marshalltown, Iowa? (Yes, I get that they say this because they were born there. I mean, why?) For a while, I

The Miller family—Amos, Emily, Lodowick, and Wells Waite—moved to Castalia, Ohio in 1852. During the first ten years of young Wells’s life, however, the family lived in the rural town of Enfield, New York. According to Enfield historian, Sue Thompson, the area was settled by John Giltner and Judah Baker in 1804. Registered as a town in November 1820 and officially registered with New York on March 16, 1821, thirty-six lots existed: the southern part of a military township lot (number 22, Ulysses). So, what does that mean, exactly? Going back further in time (July 3, 1790), Revolutionary War veterans

Erie County, Ohio: A Conversation About Politics On October 1, 1894, the Sandusky Register shares information about people being considered for a run in Congress—and Wells Waite Miller was part of this conversation. It will take a bit of introduction, though, to get to his involvement. In a piece titled “Erie County in Congress,” the newspaper notes how the county’s last representative in the halls of Congress was General William D[ell] Lindsley. Born on December 25, 1812 in New Haven, Connecticut where he attended common schools, Lindsley moved to Buffalo, New York in 1832, and then near Sandusky, Oho. He

Ohio Antietam Battlefield Commission In 1904, D. Cunningham and Wells Waite Miller published this report, and I was reminded of this publication while reading Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War by Brian Matthew Jordan. In this book, he dispels myths about Union soldiers returning home at the war’s end and shares post-war experiences common among them. As I read his book, I realized how many of them described actions that Wells took. For example, he tried to stay in the military, post-war; he served in the Invalid Corps after his injuries, but he was not accepted into