The Case for Christina Kissling Miller

My great-great grandmother, Jennie Brattain, was married to David Philip Dean, the first systematic genealogist of the family. He gathered information on her family, too, so I knew going into my genealogical research that the Brattains (pronounced Brat-ton, not Bruh-tayn) were a Scottish family who arrived in the United States around 1750. They were Presbyterian when they arrived, but the scion of the family married a Quaker. Like many other Scotch-Irish families, they settled in North Carolina before moving west.

Jennie Brattain Dean's grandfather was Soloman Brattain, born in North Carolina in 1809, and dying in Henry County, Indiana, in 1892. (The Brattains were shockingly long-lived. Quite a number of them lived into their 90s). From the earlier research on the family, I knew Solomon's wife -- Jennie's grandmother -- was Catherine Miller. But what were her roots? Other than the 1850 census listing her birth place as Virginia and her birth year as 1812, we had no information.

I easily found the marriage license for "Solomon Bratton" and "Catharine Miller". They were married in Wayne County, Indiana, on August 23, 1832 by Hugh Cull(1). Hugh Cull was a well-known Methodist preacher in Wayne County(2). That tells us that the Miller family was living in Indiana in the 1830s.

Unfortunately the 1830 census did not record the names of individuals in each household. Only the names of the head of household were recorded, plus a count of the number of people in each household. There were 19 Miller households in Wayne County, Indiana, in the 1830 census. That doesn't narrow down the options very much, especially since Catherine Miller could have lived in a nearby county and not in Wayne at all. The number of Miller households in Indiana as a whole was in the hundreds.

I did have one more clue: Solomon Brattain's sister, Mary Ann, married a man named William Miller. In the Midwest at this time, "sibling-swap" marriages were relatively common. In other words, siblings from one family (often a brother and sister) would marry siblings from another family. I've mentioned this phenomenon before in my post about John Stewart Dean and Hannah Baird.

Luckily, William Miller lived long enough to be caught up in the mania for local history that swept the nation in the late 1800s. At that time, a rash of books were published by counties and towns chronicling the early European conquest of the area and featuring biographies of elderly residents (especially White Anglo-Saxon Protestant residents, but that's another story.) William Miller was featured in a book on the history of Wayne County, Indiana, published in 1884(3). This source gave his parents as John and Christina (Kissling) Miller, who had come to Indiana from Virginia in 1812. William was their youngest child, born in 1814, after they moved to Indiana. The same source gave the names of all nine of John and Christina's children, and the second-youngest was a girl named Catherine. Two years is a pretty standard birth spacing, so this Catherine could very well have been born in 1812 in Virginia, just like "our" Catherine Miller. The book also said that the Millers were Methodists (remember, Soloman and Catherine were married by the Methodist preacher) and that John Miller had died in 1822, but Christina Kissling Miller had lived until 1860. Soloman and Catherine Brattain named two of their children John and Christina. Yes, those are common names, but it is one more indication that John and Christina Miller could have been relatives of Catherine Miller Brattain.

Returning to the 1830 census, there was a Christina Miller who was the head of a household in Wayne Township, Indiana. On the same census page (meaning they must have lived close by) were John and Joseph Brattain, the father and uncle of Soloman Brattain.(4).

Unfortunately, the household of Christina Miller did not include a female of the correct age to be Catherine. However, the census may be in error, or Catherine may have been living with a sibling or working in someone's home. This would be all the more likely since William was the only son of the Millers, so Catherine's mother, a widow with only a 16 year old son, may have needed all the help she could get.

All in all, I believe the circumstantial evidence is strong suggesting that Catherine Miller Brattain was the sister of William Miller, and the daughter of John and Christina Kissling Miller.

There are on-line genealogies of both the Miller and Kissling families. Both are German and had been in the United States since the early to mid 1700s. At least two of Christina's fore-bearers fought in the Revolution. John's family is harder to trace (John Miller is a criminally common name), but it appears he was related somehow to the family of Martin Luther Miller of Wythe County, Virginia, where John and Christina were married. Martin's sons, Isaac and Daniel, also lived in Wayne County, Indiana, and Solomon and Christina named one of their sons Isaac. I'll post more on the deeper history as I get more information.

References:
(1)  "Indiana Marriages, 1811-2007," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:27VG-3TJ : accessed 27 August 2015), Solomon Bratton and Catharine Miller, 23 Aug 1832; citing , Wayne, Indiana, county clerk offices, Indiana; FHL microfilm 1,838,642..

(2) pioneerhttps://waynecountyhistory.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/rev-hugh-cull-of-wayne-county-indiana/.

(3) History of Wayne County, Indiana, 1884, p. 292. Available on-line:https://books.google.com/books?id=V8oUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&dq=isaac+miller+wayne+county+indiana&source=bl&ots=YoL6e1ljC5&sig=yx7S2AmreSKfu7D5xf_HS2ckbko&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC0Q6AEwA2oVChMIzvDwypLIxwIVQhaSCh3tmg-g#v=onepage&q=brattain&f=false.

(4) "United States Census, 1830", database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XHPB-M26 : accessed 27 August 2015),