West Liberty History 1838-1938

Source: One Hundred Years of History
* Commemorating a Century of Progress in the West Liberty Community * WEST LIBERTY, IOWA
MILLER-KEITH CLAN

One Hundred and Thirty Eight
Years of their History
by
Hal Keith Miller

In the year 1800 Grandfather Miller was born in Ireland. That same year in Virginia, Grandfather Keith first saw the light of day. Both married, and both, with their wives, spent their last years in West Liberty and all four are buried there.

To the Millers, eight children were born. To the Keiths, eleven. Three millers married three Keiths and all of these, the second generation, with one exception, are buried in West Liberty.

Between eighty and eighty-five years ago, Grandfather Keith was conducting a shoe shop there; J. S. Wilson, who married Harriet Keith, a harness shop; Albert Keith, the mill; Abe Keith was sheriff of Muscatine County and my own father, Robert Miller, who married Maria Keith, was in the dry goods business. Sheriff Keith's wife was a Miller. My father later moved to what is now the Steen farm and there established the Plum Grove herd of shorthorn cattle, not unknown in the Middle West. John Miller, who married Adda Keith, acquired the adjoining farm to the south, now the Kennedy place, and Wm. Miller the one to the north where the Angerers now live. He married a Starr, figuring I guess, that too many Millers were marrying too many Keiths. Anyway it was on these three farms that the Miller tribe lived for so many years. All are gone now except three of Robert Miller's children, Celeste, Howard and myself. Soon we too will be coming home to take the places reserved for us in Oakridge. Mrs. John Miller (Aunt Add) died here in Los Angeles only four years ago at the age of ninety-three, the last of her generation.

There are, or were, in the next or third generation, twenty Millers and thirty Keiths, eleven of them double cousins. Those who are still living are widely scattered but most of those who have gone on are buried in West Liberty.

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