Meri's Family Tree
A Little Introduction to Meri's Family Tree
My mother was the daughter of Elmer Miller and Lela Emoline Lile.  Her father was the son of two Swedish immigrants -- Samuel Bengtssen Miller and Wilhelmina "Minnie" Blomgren -- who met and married in Walla Walla, Washington before moving to eastern Oregon shortly after 1900. They farmed in Wallowa County near Enterprise, then moved to Cove in Union County, Oregon after Samuel died in 1925. Minnie, the family matriarch, died in LaGrande, Union County, Oregon in 1964 at the ripe old age of 96. 

Lela Emoline Lile Miller was the daughter of George David Franklin Lile, the only surviving son of Isaac Lile (Lyle) and his wife Sarah Caroline Ellis. George's wife Sarah Emoline Clayton was the daughter of Daniel Clayton and Cyrene Jeraldine Moore. The Claytons and Cyrene's parents, William and Priscilla Ayers Moore,  came to the Walla Walla Valley by wagon train in the fall of 1862. Isaac Lile arrived in Walla Walla a few years earlier and is believed to have established the first bootmaker and cobbler's business in the young settlement.

Sarah Caroline Ellis (Isaac Lile's wife), her widowed mother, and many members of her extended family came to the Walla Walla Valley from Mahaska County, Iowa in a wagon train led by Captain John K. Kennedy. 

My paternal grandfather was Loren Lloyd Arnett, born in 1900 in Cherokee Territory. Lloyd's Arnett ancestors lived in Tennessee, Missouri, and Oklahoma before he moved to Oregon with his parents -- Anvil and Mary Biggs Arnett-- in the early 1900's.  He was a descendant of Alexander Arnett, a Scottish cooper born sometime between 1690 and 1700 who came to America in the 1720s as an indentured servant and worked making barrels on a Maryland plantation to work off his indenture.


My grandmother Mafie Marie Rosencrans Arnett, was the daughter of Benajmin Tolbert Rosencrans and his wife Eliza Jane Bliss. The progenitors of the Rosencrans family in America were Harmon Hendricks Rosenkrans and his wife Magdelena Dircks, who lived in New Amsterdam in the 1600s. The first "American" Mrs. Rosenkrans was quite a spit-fire, apparently. There's a three part article about her colorful personality and antics in the 1959 New York Genealogical and Biographical Society's journal. (Her unladylike behavior got her shipped back to the old country, along with her husband, by the Dutch East India Trading Company, until she learned to behave.) Marie's mother Eliza Bliss was a descendant of Thomas Bliss and Margaret Hulins, immigrants from England who resided at Hartford, Connecticut in the mid-1600's. After Thomas's death, Margaret and most of her children moved to Springfield, Massachusetts.