(1840 to 1862)
James Russell Miller was always too much engrossed in the service of God and men to pay any attention to collecting facts concerning his ancestors. But those who have had the opportunity to trace the Miller family to its source across the sea have learned facts both interesting and illuminating.
The ancestors on the mother’s side were named McCarrell. The McCarrells came originally from Scotland, where Sir Lachlan McCarrell – the chief of the clan – was friend and companion of Sir William Wallace. Early in the seventeenth century the McCarrells went for religious freedom to Ireland. In Ulster they found the blessings they sought. Samuel McCarrell, one of the descendants of the transplanted Scotchmen, died in County Armagh in 1789, at the age of ninety-five. His son, Thomas – the great grandfather of J.R. Miller – was born in County Armagh in 1741. He learned the trade of a weaver, and later came to America in 1777, in a merchant ship commanded by his uncle. The blockading of the ports prevented his immediate return home. Soon he had no desire to return: his heart was so stirred by what he had seen and heard of the struggles of the Colonies that he became a soldier of the Revolution about October, 1777. He was with George Washington in the camp at Valley Forge the following winter. He had with him his Bible and his Confession of Faith, which are treasured today by his descendants.* It is a tradition among these descendants that he was once struck in the breast by a bullet, but that the Bible saved his life.
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