San Antonio house

Once a good idea is born, it should be fed and nurtured.  How about more 69 year olds in my family tree?

Maybe go back another 69 years, beyond Eugenia Almetta Booth Miller's, my great grandmother's birth 69 years before mine.  The next generation back would have been born in 1804. Perhaps still alive during the Civil War.  Next would be someone born in 1735.  That person would have gone through the Revolutionary War, if they were in America at the time, and lived that long.

I do fortunately have documents copied from the Rogers Family Bible which my grandfather typed by  hand as he copied them.  He made 4 carbons, and gave one to my father.  But those records are of my father's family.  So far I've been looking at just my mother's family.

Look at what a neat tie these people's lives have together...some of whom lived 69 years, and what that year of achievement meant, not to mention all the rest of their interesting lives.  And even just having been born 69 years before me, then 69 years before that person...jumping back through our history.

I believe I visited Eugenia Booth Miller's house in the 40's when going from Houston to San Antonio to see my grandmother, Mozelle Booth Miller, who I think lived here herself.  I missed ever meeting Eugenia "Grandma" but I understood that she mostly raised my mother since Mozelle was widowed twice while very young.

I remember arriving in San Antonio at night, and the streets had an interesting drainage system, many of which were flooded.  The fun I remember was driving over humps at each intersection, which sent me bouncing (on the back seat) in a moment of weightlessness.  I giggled, and of course my mother harrumphed, which was her usual comment about my father's driving.  But I do remember that ride as being as good as many an amusement park ride later on.  I also remember later during the day, driving right through several inches of water, over some dam or bridge which was flooded as much of San Antonio was at that time.

If not Grandmommy Mozelle, one of the other daughters (Dorothy Dain Miller or Margaret Etha Miller) might have been living in this home still.  Margaret never married so easily could have stayed in the homestead.  Rowena (the 4th sister) had married a man named Rodgers many years before my mother also married a Rogers.  Since it was spelled differently, everyone assumed there was no relationship.  But I've never tried to trace it.  If you go far enough back, spelling got pretty iffy.

I don't remember my great-grandfather, Charles Herman Miller, who may have been still alive when I was born. I believe he had been a conductor on the railroad.  I did find it strange that my grandmother would never travel by train, but only took airplanes or drove to visit people.  I wonder if he had an train accident or told her something that kept her away from trains.  I personally loved travelling by train as a young girl with my mother from St. Louis to go visit my grandmother and her family in San Antonio.

A map of "The Santa Fé Route" and subsidiary lines, as published in an 1891 issue of the Grain Dealers and Shippers Gazetteer.