The Miller family has deep roots in the County Longford countryside between the villages of Legan/Lenamore and Rathowen. Quite how deep is unclear, but there are local records of the family dating back to the 1780s. One account suggests that the Millers of the Irish midlands owe their origins to German Palatine Protestant immigrants, with the name originating as Müller. Indeed, it is understood that many Miller families in North America have names Anglicised from their German-speaking roots, and while the Irish Palatine Association does list Miller among its surname index the Palatines more typically settled in southern Irish counties. In Britain the surname is quite common but has two distinct origins; in England, it comes from the obvious explanation of a mill operator, while in Scotland the name is apparently derived from a stream named Molendinar, around which the city of Glasgow eventually grew. Wherever the Miller/Millar family originally came from, they had become very numerous among the Protestant tenant farming community of south-east Longford by the end of the nineteenth century, with a number of distinct (but sometimes intermarried) families living in close proximity to each other. There were branches of the family established at places like Kinard, Corraboola, Killeen and Tully. George Henry Miller of the latter family was particularly prominent, being a Justice of the Peace, a Parliamentary candidate for South Longford under the Liberal Unionist banner in 1892 and a senior member of the Freemasons at provincial level (after his death the Ballymahon Lodge, No. 308, was renamed the ‘George Henry Miller Lodge’). He was most likely the same G.H. Millar who reported seeing a ghostly monk at Abbeyshrule graveyard one night in 1875.
The townland of Clontymullen (alternatively, Clontymullan, Cluntymullen or just Clunty) was home to another branch of the family. Isaac Miller farmed nine acres here in 1834. Andrew Miller jun., George Miller and William Miller were all noted as leaseholders in Clontymullen in 1838, and Andrew Miller (36 acres) and Isaac Miller (29 acres) were both tenants of Richard M. Fox in the townland in 1854. How these men were related to each other is, unfortunately, obscure. The Fox family were landlords of the local Foxhall estate, based around the local stately home (now demolished) and the private chapel (now in ruins) dedicated to the memory of their ancestor Sir Nathaniel Fox. The Fox family tree included many notable military and church figures, as well as close links to the Edgeworth family of Edgeworthstown. Following the deaths, in quick succession, of his grandfather and father Richard Maxwell Fox had become master of the estate in 1834 at just 18 years of age. He would go on to represent County Longford as an O’Connellite MP before his own untimely death in 1856.
Foxhall
Speaking in 2007, Phyllis Burnett (née Miller) recalled a story about her great-grandmother having originally come from England to work as a servant in Foxhall. Although this was a piece of oral history from 170 years previous, it seems to be backed up by subsequent evidence; Anne Ebbles came from the coastal village of Woodbury in Devon (the daughter of a miller, coincidentally) and must have arrived in Foxhall around the early 1830s. Mark Bence-Jones’ 1987 study of Irish landed society, ‘Twilight of the Ascendancy’, indicates that it was fashionable for the grander Irish country houses to employ butlers, footmen, cooks and maids from England, while the Irish were considered more suited to outdoor roles like gamekeepers, ghillies and grooms. Although not the largest estate in Longford, Foxhall had considerable prestige at this point in its long history, and would probably have followed such a trend.
Anne Ebbles married Andrew Miller in December 1838 in Kilglass Church, the parish church of both Clontymullen and Foxhall. They had at least three daughters and two sons before Andrew’s death in September 1855. At this point Anne’s story becomes quite murky; just ten months later she married Isaac Miller. As already noted, both Andrew and Isaac (whose father was also named Isaac Miller) farmed land in Clontymullen in 1854, so Isaac was a neighbour and presumably a close relation of Andrew’s. More curious still is that Anne and Isaac were married in Dublin and were recorded as sharing an address on the rather rundown Mecklenburg Street at that time, despite Anne’s children not yet being old enough to run the farm in Clontymullen themselves. The couple returned to Longford, but little more is recorded about them, although there is a newspaper reference to a pub run by a Mr Miller in Clontymullen in 1856, the scene of an argument leading to a murder and a seven-year manhunt. Although Anne is memorialised alongside her first husband in Kilglass Cemetery she actually died at the home of her daughter in West Malvern, Worcestershire, in December 1898. Isaac had already died sometime between 1865 and 1891. ‘Master’ Patrick Greene, in one of his earliest local history studies of the Legan area in the 1920s, confirmed that Isaac Miller of Clontymullen was succeeded on his farm by his stepson, John Miller – the son of Andrew Miller.
Colourised photos, believed to be of John Miller of Clontymullen, County Longford
John Alexander Miller – reputedly nicknamed ‘John Miller of the orchard’ to distinguish him from others of the same name in the locality – was born in 1844. He is understood to have spent some time in England with an aunt prior to his 1866 marriage to Susan Mason. The Masons, from the nearby townland of Curry, were part of another long-established local Protestant farming family. Names such as Flower, Fee, Mason, Miller and Mills appear time and again through the pages of any church registers from this part of Longford, all of them interconnected through marriage. There was a tendency among this community to have much larger families than was typical of Irish Protestants, and John and Susan had at least twelve children. They were also both surprisingly long-lived for the era, with John reaching 86 and Susan 94; just for context, Susan was born weeks before the outbreak of the Great Famine and died weeks before the outbreak of World War II. It may have been for pragmatic reasons, therefore, that the family broke with the Irish tradition of the eldest son inheriting the farm; it was Bob Miller, the fifth of their eight sons, who eventually took over Clontymullen. Of the other children, Andrew worked in his uncle Andy Mason’s shop before marrying and becoming a police officer in Northern Ireland. Jack likewise became a police officer; he married a member of the Slye family of noted coachbuilders of Talbot Street, Dublin, and moved to Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) where he died of typhoid in 1923. Maggie and Annie both moved for a time to Cork where they were both married in a double wedding ceremony in 1901, Annie marrying Tom Miller from the Kinard branch of the clan. Maria remained unmarried, Susan junior died from measles at age 2 and Fred died from tuberculosis at 17.
The four remaining sons all became involved in the drapery business. William Thomas Miller, their father’s younger brother, had left Clontymullen for Dublin where he was working as an assistant draper at the time of his marriage to Maria Mooney in 1877. By 1879 William had established his own outfitting premises at No. 30 Ellis Quay, on the north bank of the River Liffey. He combined the drapery business with that of a ‘Post Office receiver’ – a precursor to the modern post office, where letter and parcel deliveries could be paid for, savings deposited and money orders sent. Around 1884 the buildings were re-numbered and No. 30 became No. 26 Ellis Quay. William and Maria had no children and they appear to have decided to pass Miller’s Outfitters over to William’s nephew. Thus, Alec Miller (born in 1875) was working as an outfitter in the shop and living in the upper rooms when he married Frances (‘Frank’) Eginton in 1900, while William and Maria themselves were living in a house in Glasnevin. At the same time, Alec’s younger brothers, Willie and George, were both learning the ropes under merchant draper William Moore in Arvagh, County Cavan.
Miller’s Outfitters, 26 Ellis Quay, Dublin, 1900s
Over the following decade, a number of changes happened at the Ellis Quay business. William retired to Rathgar and transferred ownership of the business to Alec. Curiously, the shop continued to be registered in William’s name right up until the late 1930s, even though William himself died in 1929 and his wife Maria in 1922. Miller’s Outfitters secured what was presumably a lucrative contract to supply uniforms to the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police. The Garda Museum in the grounds of Dublin Castle preserves the story of these earlier Irish police forces, and they confirm that cadets would receive training – and perhaps their uniforms – at the Phoenix Park, adjacent to Ellis Quay. Rank-and-file constables in these precursors to the modern Gardaí would be fitted with standard-issue uniforms but, notably, officers were given an allowance to commission their own personalised uniforms, which often included enhancements like gold thread. Miller’s was also very near to the Royal Barracks (later Collins Barracks) and may have also supplied military uniforms. Alec continued to live above the premises with his wife, where the first four of their children (Percy, Gordon, Olive & Eva) were born, and with Frances’ sister Annie Eginton who worked as a draper. Alec’s brother Willie also worked in the thriving business and lived with his wife and daughters just around the corner on Blackhall Avenue. In 1910 Alec and Frances decided to move out of the city centre to the more spacious and up-market surroundings of Sandycove, and the upper rooms of Ellis Quay then become home to Willie Miller’s growing family for the next number of years.
In December 1906 it was reported that Mr G. Hanley of Sandycove was “building a semi-detached villa in Otranto Place, the architect being Mr. Wm. Stirling, 4 College Green.” This consisted of two new houses added to the two Victorian houses already on the short street which faces Dublin Bay. The new houses were named ‘Colintraive’ (no. 3) and ‘Kilbarron’ (no. 4), and the first resident of Colintraive was a Mrs Baker. The significance of the house name is unknown, as is whether it was chosen by Baker, Hanley or Stirling; it is the name of an obscure coastal village in Scotland but was also the name of a successful racehorse of the time owned by a Mr Binnie. Mrs Baker’s fate is difficult to discover, given the lack of a first name, but in April 1910 the household furniture of Colintraive was sold by auction and two months later Battersby’s Auctioneers of Westmoreland Street offered both Colintraive and Kilbarron for sale. The Miller family were living at Colintraive by December of that year, where, within the space of a week, Frances’ aunt died and her fifth child, Noel, was born.
‘Colintraive’, Sandycove, County Dublin
Right up until her final years Olive Miller would recall fond memories of an idyllic childhood spent in Colintraive, and one can only imagine the marked contrast it must have been with the congested and noisy city centre. The many happy photographs of the young family and the repertoire of songs they learned as children and sang into old age seem to confirm this. In a candid moment, Olive and Eva even confessed that they would sometimes spy through the fences of the ‘Forty Foot’ bathing area next to the landmark Martello Tower – an area then associated with exclusively male nude swimming. The new house was spacious enough to again accommodate Frances’ sister Annie, who continued to work as a draper and help raise the children, though they lived in fear of her violent outbursts until they were old enough to defend themselves. Also sharing the home for a time was Alec’s younger brother George, who was then an assistant draper. George is understood to have enlisted during World War I before becoming a commercial traveller; a favourite uncle to Frances’ children, he met with an unfortunate end when he fell into the Grand Canal during a wartime blackout of Dublin in 1943. The youngest of Alec’s brothers, Alfie, also trained in the same trade in County Down, where lived with eldest brother Andrew. Alec and Frances’ sixth and final child, Kathleen, followed in mid-1912 but by then Alec was already suffering from tuberculosis and died months later. His family maintained for some time that he had died from pneumonia (which he had, but as a secondary symptom) because there was a popular association between TB and poor hygiene. In fact, as Caitriona Clear’s book ‘Social change and everyday life in Ireland, 1850-1922’ points out, we now know that tuberculosis was especially prevalent among tailors, dressmakers, stonemasons and others working in dry, dusty conditions. Notwithstanding a substantial inheritance of around €250,000 in today’s money, the loss of a family’s principal breadwinner in this era left their future very uncertain.
In the initial period Frances took on ownership of the shop and post office on Ellis Quay, with her brother-in-law Willie Miller continuing as live-in manager. During the Rising of 1916 the shop suffered damage from gunfire, probably related to the republican occupation of the Mendicity Institution on the opposite side of the Liffey and the subsequent counter-attack. Miller’s successfully sought compensation to the tune of £9 7s 7d for broken plate-glass windows, a smashed mirror and bullet-damaged tailoring material. At some point around 1917, however, the business arrangement ended and Willie Miller departed to set up his own drapery. This setback ultimately resulted in Frances and her children leaving Sandycove and returning to the quarters above the shop on Ellis Quay in order to run it personally, which she did for the next twenty years along with her sister and with assistant draper Thomas Reynolds. Colintraive was sold, to the family’s dismay, and during the 1930s it was renamed ‘Carrick’, which remains its name today.
26 Ellis Quay, 1920s & 1930s
Frances’ children spent much time with their extended family back in County Longford. Their Miller grandparents still lived at Clontymullen until the 1930s, along with Bob Miller and Maggie after she was widowed. Remarkably, Bob had first married Euphemia (‘Effie’) Miller of the other Clontymullen Miller family, and after her death he married Polly Miller of the Kinard branch. When Annie Miller married Polly’s uncle Tom Miller the couple had initially lived in Kinard, but after converting to the ‘Cooneyite’ Christian sect they looked for a larger house where they could host meetings of the religious community. They eventually settled at Carrickbawn, near Ballynacargy, County Westmeath, where they were joined by Annie’s sister Maria, Willie Miller’s daughter Susie and, after Tom’s death, by Bob & Polly Miller. The Millers of Ellis Quay were regular visitors to Carrickbawn; Percy, the eldest, had begun work as a clerk with the Bank of Ireland in Listowel, County Kerry, in the early 1920s, but when he also contracted tuberculosis he was advised by doctors that his best chance of survival would be the clean air of Switzerland. Unfortunately, this was not an option for the family and so he spent his final days resting at Carrickbawn instead before his death at Ellis Quay in 1925. It was also at Carrickbawn that Olive, through her cousin Susie, met her future husband John Moxham. Susie had married a local farmer named Cecil Flower and settled at Sunfield, Rathsallagh. John Moxham was their near neighbour in Killenboy, and thus the two cousins born in Dublin both ended up living close to the original Miller farm which their fathers had left decades earlier, and remained lifelong friends. A fire destroyed much of the house at Carrickbawn in 1933, but the family stayed on and rebuilt.
Over subsequent decades, however, both Clontymullen and Carrickbawn passed to new owners. The shop at Ellis Quay was also coming to an end; by early 1937 Frances Miller had closed the drapery & post office and moved to a new home in Ranalagh. The Miller business trust was formally dissolved in May 1941, with the remaining assets divided equally among the ten nieces and nephews of William Miller who had reached adulthood (or, if already deceased, among their children). 26 Ellis Quay then became P.J. Sweeney’s chemist until the 1980s or 1990s, when the building was finally demolished to make way for the modern Clifden Court apartments.
There are still numerous Millers and related families living in south-east Longford, but the graveyard around the now-ruined Kilglass Church provides evidence of just how extensive and complex the family network once was. This is only the story of one small part of that network, and I’m indebted to the late Ian Moxham for doing most of the groundwork in recording their history.
See also:
True Irish ghost stories (1914): G.H. Millar
Interior photos of ‘Carrick’ (formerly Colintraive), Otranto Place, 2016
Moxhams of Ireland 
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Great story, and complicated, too. I’ll take some time to figure it out fully. I’m Bob Kirk, of the Kirk family of Clonfin (Clonbronry) who married into the Robert Miller family. Robert was Andrew’s brother who doesn’t show or your tree. I match DNA with Donald Moxham on FTDNA & GEDMatch