Civil War History

The ancestors of Wells Waite Miller (Thomas and Isabel Miller) came to the American Colonies as part of the Great Puritan Migration. For more than 25 years, they appeared to serve as important members of the community, first in Massachusetts and then in Connecticut. That is, until 1666. Sin, Tragedy, Trial, and Excommunication That year, on May 6, Thomas and Isabel Miller’s 22-year-old maid, Sarah Nettleton, gave birth to a son named Thomas—and the father was in fact Thomas Miller. He was 56 years old with Sarah more than a decade younger than the Miller’s daughter, Ann. To make matters

Wells Waite Miller came from hardy English stock with his ancestors sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to immigrate to the American Colonies in the 1600s. Their names were Thomas Miller and Isabel (née Bird) Miller and, although they initially seemed to settle in well in their new homeland, they also created more than a whiff of scandal to add to the positive contributions they made. English Ancestors of Wells Waite Miller Thomas and Isabel were likely born in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, England—Thomas on November 7, 1609 and Isabel in 1613. Thomas’s birth family, we know, was a fruitful one. His

I recently began to share my research into the life of a Union Civil War soldier, Wells Waite Miller, a man who nearly died at Gettysburg. This post picks up that story and shares his journey towards the small farming town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania using Lt. Colonel Franklin Sawyer’s book on the subject, The Eighth Ohio at Gettysburg, as a source for quotes and memories. Journey of Wells Waite Miller In response to Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Union soil, the Army of the Potomac was directed to head to Pennsylvania. This, of course, included Wells Waite Miller and

In 1999, my husband and I took our two young sons, aged nine and almost seven, to see the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania. We attended an orienting presentation of the Electric Map where small bulbs lit up to demonstrate where each of the two sides—Union/United States and Confederate—were located during key parts of the three-day battle. To give you a sense of that experience, here is a map of the Gettysburg campaign from the Library of Congress. We visited the Gettysburg Cyclorama, an historic oil-on-canvas painting of battle scenes laid out in a 377-foot circle. And, of course, we trekked

Note: I became interested in Obed Caswell and his brother Walter when writing a biography about their niece’s husband, Civil War soldier Wells Waite Miller. I am still waiting for the Civil War service and pension records for the Caswell brothers and I expect their story to evolve as I learn more. Is an historical biography ever really “done”? Anyone who has information about Wells Waite Miller, his brother Lodowick, or Obed Caswell/Walter Caswell, please contact me! Obed Caswell was the great-grandson of one Revolutionary War soldier and the grandson of another; the son of a man who fought in