I don’t have a lot of info on Ruby herself – but as I’ve recently had a nibble on the Rev. Billy Brown post (Ancestor #16 ), I thought I’d update the story a bit from the Miller side.

Some genealogical breakthroughs come as a result of painstaking work and a particular kind of obsession. This one fell on me. As simple as finding a link to an existing family tree on Ancestry.com. This tree suggested Ruby’s parents were Aaron Miller Jr. and Bethiah Dewey. That struck me as interesting because one of Billy & Ruby’s sons was named Timothy Dewey Brown. And it seems there was a very well-known man, Rev. Timothy Dewey, running around the same part of the world as Billy, at the same time, doing roughly the same kind of work.

Maybe it’s me – but I tend to take coincidences like these and really dig into them. The work may not pay off every time, or every tenth time, even – but I usually learn something valuable along the way.

This one did pay off – in a way. These were Ruby’s parents – and Bethiah was related to Rev. Timothy Dewey – though only as a 5th cousin. (Meaning, of course, that even for a lady born in the waning years of the 18th Century, her family was rooted in New England back at least five more generations.)

The big payoff in this journey was discovering that I have a relative who was featured in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. (And another named Octavia Ammonia Dewey!)