The question was asked on the Germanna_Colonies Mailing List at Rootsweb as to whether anything had been written on the Millers that moved to southwest Virginia from the Little Fork community. The answer to that question is, “Yes.”
Clovis Miller wrote an article for Beyond Germanna (page 515) which was based on the publication, “ The Family and Descendants of John Frederick Miller 1711-1787 of Halifax County, Virginia ”. The latter is a limited circulation publication of a substantial size which is in the hands of family members and a limited number of libraries.
The situation is that quite a bit is known from Nassau-Siegen, and a lot is known from Halifax County. In between, for about ten years, there is a limited amount of information except for the knowledge that one of the Miller (Müller) brothers had land in the Little Fork of Culpeper County, Virginia. By comparing names before the departure from Germany and names from Halifax County, we must assume that the Miller families and the Creutz family moved together over similar paths.
John Frederick Miller was born in 1711 as the first child of Hermann and Anna Margarethe (Häner) Miller and was christened on August 2 of that year at Freudenberg, west of Siegen. In 1733, he was accepted as an apprentice in the Guild of Steelsmiths and Toolmakers, of which his father was a Master. Johann Friedrich Muller married Anna Maria, daughter of Hans Henrich and Margarethe (Schneider) Arnd on 4 July 1737, when he was 26 and she was 20. On 2 January 1738, their first child, Matthias, was born at Freudenberg. Within a few months, the family was making plans to find a new life in America. Other individuals who came to America with the Millers were Herman Bach with his wife Anna Margaret and daughter Anna Ella, Hymenäus Creutz (Crites) and his wife Elizabeth, Hermann Miller, George Weidrnann (Wayman), and Johannes Hofman. The last three were bachelors. Hermann Muller was a brother of Johann Friedrich Müller. (That the wives named here actually arrived is problematic since so many people lost their lives in the Atlantic crossing.)
The Millers and the Crites, or Creutz, families are found together in Halifax County. The best starting place for reading about the Millers would be the article in
Beyond Germanna
, and then the larger work which was cited earlier. Information was available at one time on the web also. It is not clear why so little information is available on these families from the Little Fork, or from the Germantown area. Presumably, they did not all own land and remained for only a limited number of years.
(22 Apr 04)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.