My Father’s Story / Growing Up Amish

[Music] well welcome youtube family today i have a very special person i'm going to have you meet and some of you have met him already in a prior video but this is my dad this is my dad aura miller and dad how old are you i'm 87. 87 is still going strong and uh mom also i'm going to introduce you to mom she's sitting over here and this is my mom this is orfa how old are you mom 87 mom's also 87. her and dad are only a few months apart in age right yes yeah and uh they're both we're very thankful that mom and dad are both with us still and mom is a lot slower she used to be mom you'll hear some of our story mom and dad's story here shortly but mom and dad uh have been married for many years and i'm actually the youngest of the family but let's get into the story let me start asking dad some questions and uh we're gonna just see where it goes but i think you're going to be very entertained and find it very interesting in the story of my parents lives so here we go okay dad let's start with what year were you born july 26 and that was um about what time frame as far as the wars were concerned that was between right after the depression i didn't uh go through the depression but we were we lived in the aftermath of the depression and and we had a good life never thought never even realized that we're in a depression for that matter but but life went on and so that's that's the start of my life so dad how many siblings did you have in your family there was 12 in our family when i grew up and you're or you're towards the older i'm the fifth one okay so 12 children dad's number five and are you the oldest living right now i'm the one who's living yes yeah why don't you just tell tell the listeners about your about mom uh how many were in her family there was 14 siblings well 14 children in mom's family and we were well so so but mom was the oldest of 15 right you were all the 15. okay so there was so there was 15. i'm sorry she was the older 14. okay so the oldest of 14 children and then then what happened and she lost her life his mother lost her life when she was 15 right there was 14 14 children mom was 15. mom was essentially a mom at age 15 with her youngest sibling being three months of age and then her dad remarried um and to a widow and she had six children six children that made 20 and then they had how many together yeah they were 20 feet 23 are all together yes so they had another uh some a few more babies together so mom said her dad always mentioned said that uh when her mom and her dad were uh speaking they would say you know your children and my children are fighting with our children so big family they weren't really fighting as such you know right just the same yeah yeah but remember that it made a good remark about right how it came about so tell me about your childhood uh like from the time you were born in 34 until you know maybe about age 15 before you joined the youth group well i joined the youth well it was a normal life we were always we were a happy family we had uh we had some my my my folks had als also some disappointments they lost a child at three years old and i was nine uh she had at that time scarlet fiero was a derided disease and we got to scarlet fever and my three-year-old sister passed away but he also she also had dramatic fever and that's what caused her death so to speak so scarlet fever and rheumatic fever really both wow okay so you what about some of the things you did growing up your dad raised mint is that right yes it wasn't the big when we had the last the last place that my folks lived there wasn't a lot of mint soil ground there permit but we we had like oh from six to ten acres of mint most of the time okay and that was a small amount that a small amount of acreage that we had men that raised men okay so at age 16 is it's the amish tradition for if your age once you turn age 16 then you get to join the youth group so between age 16 and you got you were held worry when you were married okay yeah at 16 i didn't have any desire and so to speak to to join the youth as such and i didn't go to very many places i didn't have a horse and buggy that time but but when i turned just before i turned 17 my dad gave me a horse and boogie then i was free to go and and i started attending the the young folks meetings so on and so forth things and whatever and i then i enjoyed that very much for that matter and then we then had to go to service at the uh age of 20. so what talked about us about the service well we were explaining about that we were what was called conscientious objectors to war and so we didn't have to go to the army we went we had to serve as a civil service and i worked at a hospital for two years to do my service in and what year what war was that that was in the korean war okay it was from 1954 to 56 because there was a draft so you had to go it was yeah i was called when i was 20 years old and i i was in the service for two years and i was i get i get to get home once a week uh you know once every two weeks to start with and after a while they had the 40 hour work week installed before that we worked 50 hours or something like that and then we were down to 40 hours a week then i had off every every week one on sundays every two weeks on sundays and yeah and during the the other uh off time it was just stayed in the at the hospital didn't go home for the two weeks normally okay so um how old were you when you got married we were 22 okay 22 years old so 16 to 22 and then uh then you lived in indiana that's where dad grew up is in mom in indiana and in in lagrange county indiana it's the was the third largest amish community uh something like that and how how long did you live there after you were married before you decided to move we were we moved in 75 we got married in 57 and lived there until the year 75 moved to rexford montana okay so 13 years something like that was that right 57 yeah or it'd be you know 18 years yeah so you live there because the oldest arlene was she was 15 15 when you moved or so okay so 57 to 75. so once you uh how many children did you have in indiana before you moved to montana oh you were you're the only one yeah yeah right okay i was only one born not born in indiana yeah she born nine children in indiana right well let's just talk about that for a minute some of the things that happened in indiana um talk to us about your firstborn uh son that was a stillborn a firstborn son we lost him at birth because what happened my wife went on a like on a quilting is or something like that and she met she had my uh not not my i i had our horse and buggy to go to work therefore she had to she used my her brother's boogie horse and bogey that lived just about a quarter of a mile from where we live just down the lane from the from my folks my wife's folks place and she when she come on her way home she met a a ty what we call a tile ditch machine it was a big machine and it took up the whole road and there was a ditch on either side and there was nothing wasn't enough room for them to to pass without kind of going the little ditch and then the horse took the extras extra space that wasn't really there and the buggy tipped over and she fell a lot of the buggy or in the against something and she got some she got bruised and that caused her to the the baby uh a little later so it was still more first yeah our first son didn't live or didn't live she was he was he died at birth so that was a very difficult thing for dad and mom as only parents can't imagine and uh and then dad and mom had arlene irvin lloyd elvi uh is that right no no arlene irvin lloyd leona leona and then uh vernon after leona yeah and then elvie so brennan passed away as well from horsham buggy accident age nine years old so you want to say anything about that dad how that happened well if there's yeah i'll just kind of go with the hype height points uh he went on a little mission he was always a very uh uh i will i say it ambitious little boy he never he always minded well and did did a lot of things with that i sent him on an errand to with a team and and he got there i was going to meet him at a certain place and he got there before i got there and so i asked him did you have to wait long he said no dad not long so anyhow that was just the last words that he said that i recall and so he was actually taking water uh to um out in the field to his older brothers and my two older brothers were working in the field cultivating corn and so on and and he took water back to them and in the meantime there was a uh our horse was a steady horse normally but but there were flies and that at that time that really bugged the horse and he started to walk like 1st of july yeah he started walking in pretty soon and our vernon was going to get off of the buggy and then when the horse started walking he went to get the lines and then he started running a little bit and pretty soon he started galloping and he he run away and he turned the corner on the road back home and he flew off the wagon and on the blacktop road and he got instantly uh killed so that was tough yeah so nine years old so that was a sad sad time dad and mom buried two children in indiana um so then you moved you moved to montana in 75 and you had then you had elvie and becky and lori as well in indiana so that was um you brought seven children out with you and then um i was born in 80 but um what were some well tell us a little bit what made you decide your mom decided to move to indiana out of indiana into this i mean at that time moving from you know central the united states to montana in 1975 especially in the culture that dad mom grew up in was quite a quite a step quite a move it's kind of like you know us moving to alaska or you know across the other side of the world or something so and it was unheard of it was it was beyond uh beyond reason that the person would want to move from indiana to montana it was uh it wasn't it wasn't easy but but it wasn't easy uh putting up with some things that we had to put up back there because i started to do history quite a bit at a young age already i started a lot of a lot of uh i read a lot of books in regards to our anabaptist background and then i and when we got married i worked on the carpenter trade and i got contact with a lot of people and they always all had their their way of their their way of religion and i was always curious about those things and we had a lot of conversations and i the more conversation we had the more i studied to to prove myself right because i thought the amish were the only ones that really had it together and everybody else just didn't quite get it but i wanted to prove myself right but the more i studied the more i proved myself wrong i we weren't the only ones that were living right and but because i was a little on the outside of the the mainstream amish churches i got a lot of flack and and it got in such a uh um severe case that i had to re i had to to promise something that i could not keep and i couldn't do that it came against my uh my better knowledge to to agree with something that was not and that i couldn't agree with therefore i knew the time was the time was going to come where they're going to be going to be disfellowshipped and kicked out so i thought well i had a chance to go to montana so i thought that might be the best option to get away from that without getting in the band or whatever you know i thought just be a easy way out of course i didn't realize it wasn't all that easy but but we did that and we were i never i never regretted that either for that matter it was everything wasn't just a piece of pie and cake but it was it was a well uh disciplined way of learning of learning and getting into a place i want to have a church how the bible taught taught in first corinthians 14 where verse 26 to 30 right in there is a is it pretty much example how the churches come together and i realized we weren't doing that and i want something better than that and we had it for a number of years in wreckers montana's where we moved to uh we moved to a place that was that was back in the sticks i didn't realize how far back it really was in other words it was it was kind of back on the six that's the point dad's made yeah so when i got there i didn't realize it's just really that bad that it wasn't it wasn't bad but it wasn't what i was looking for for our place to be living but nevertheless i i want to make the best of it and i thought that's that's that's actually better than what we have to do because i didn't i thought this would be a way to to have him maybe have a church the way it should be and and and be it and be in a place where they they couldn't really reach us because we're too far away from home so i know a lot of you watch uh watch our channel because you're interested in you know homesteading and i'd say dad and mom were the the real homesteaders because they moved out to a place that was just woods really just woods obviously no electricity no water and there was years i remember even up until i was probably about 10 9 or 10 before we actually had running water in our house and we just always had an outhouse and of course no no electricity at all um so that's the way dad and mom came from and you know it was truly homesteading so they built a home out of the woods and that's where dad mom that's where you started your log home business um in 1980 about the year i was born you built your first log house actually my brothers built a log cabin back in the woods uh just for fun just a tiny little cabin probably about eight by ten or something eight by twelve and that kind of started the idea maybe we could actually build log homes so that's really where the roots were and i'm grateful to dad for moving to montana because i love the west and i love everything about uh living here so grateful dad for that okay one thing i want to mention that actually my two oldest boys irvin and lloyd started the log home business by building a little cabin on the under on the creek and they had uh four walls of course and the door entered over and then they lit a little fireplace one one end of it and on the underneath on the top of the fireplace there was a little uh motto which says i need no mention here below and that cabin actually still stands um it's amazing after all these years um a lot of years it's i guess it'd be over 45 years later it's still standing there without any stain or metal no maintenance yeah the roof is kind of rotting but we need to put a new roof on there uh to keep then wait that thing is let last another couple hundred years yeah okay moving on tell us about some of the obstacles you faced when you moved to montana or in montana what were some of those things that i mean short of you know hacking a home out of the woods well there were some things that you that happened with the sawmill and everything okay well the the thing is when you move to it you go to my when you live in rome you do have the romans and when we lived directed at the rexford i looked around and see what what kind of occupation would be a good occupation to have well there was only one way to look that was trees and i thought well maybe a sawmill i i had some experience working with a sawmill but never run a sawmill or such never cutting any lamp timber on a sawmill but i thought we can we'll learn that and and i thought we just have to maybe sell logs that's the only thing we could really think about doing uh because he couldn't work construction work because it was too far to go the to start doing any work any construction work whatever so so we we did we bought we bought the soil and started sewing logs it was that wasn't easy because you had to go like 50 miles to get to the first machine shop to do any work in case we needed and there was a lot of that that had to be done building a sawmill because we we bought one that already was was working but it all always needed quite a bit of a lot of things that it needed and it was this was a circle sawn yeah the big big blade that has spun around that was not accurate yeah five but certainly scrag mills i want what you call it no we had a scratch too but that's that's different that's a difference so you were what were you sawing when you first these railroad cants yeah we had no we saw railroad ties ties yeah or whatever yeah railroad ties yeah we had we bought a railroad ties contract with the sawmill that came with the sawmill so that that's one reason we bought this this sawmill because he had a contractor selling railroad ties and and so we we had a guy that had a little uh two-ton truck and he would hold these lotus load of ties to the place where they do the uh yeah right yeah yeah they dip them in the stuff but yeah so so then what happened tell us about what well then years ago we're so on about about a year and a half or so just getting really good starting just dug in really good and it was we i enjoyed it we were doing okay because we finally got the kinks all worked pretty much all worked out we were really kind of streamlining it we were selling lumber and all of a sudden it all came to nothing uh we had a fire at the mill and it burnt to the ground and it was just nothing less left but ashes and so we had to start all over with with just simply about nothing we thought we had nothing but we said but but god was with us we always we turn it over to him and he said we we just said that this that's beyond our uh ways that we can know how to get past this or how we get over this and get started new without a sawmill without anything and we had invested heavily in timber sales and that but that's what we still had that but we didn't know how to use because we didn't have a mill to saw it on so a neighbor came a neighbor came by and they said would you be interested in sewing in in the shares because we knew we had a lot of timber out there i said i'm open to whatever so so we started we bought a sawmill he bought a sawmill and and we rigged it we put her put it together and started this had a good sawmill and started sewing logs starts cutting ties and and full barns for six to sixes for pole buildings and we did that for a couple of uh for a couple years then we uh also sold logs out of this uh our timber sales and we bought 20 acres back back then and built a house did you log how did you log the place i've always wondered did you love it did you have somebody you logged it really okay we had a sawmill there and locked it and how did you get the stumps out and stuff did you have well because it was just a feel as long as i can remember it's a field yeah well uh they came out a little belittled you know we had i don't know just we pastured it then the logs kind of stopped kind of really and deteriorated personally and then we had got somebody in we yeah we we had a neighbor in that d.a cat okay they pushed them out pushed them out okay yeah sure that's right okay then you lived in this place called rexford montana or also known as west kootenay it's tucked all the way up against the canadian border our home was about a mile from the canadian border is that right that's right yeah just and we go up there sometimes you know visitors would be interested in going to canada so we go up there to the border you know stick our legs through the fence or hands or whatever and then we're also close to the idaho border so it's all the way in the really in the northwest corner of montana but then in in that was in 1975 you know dad mom moved there and then 1992 uh we made another move the only move that i was involved with but uh that's what we moved to libby montana which is where we still live now so kind of the same reasons you moved from indiana dad you moved decided to move down here to libby and when we we came here dad was always an entrepreneur still is and uh he bought 830 acres is that right yes and all in one track that was a really a miracle that that we were able to do that there's nothing like that available really on the market today with this type of it had a hay field uh timber and the first thing that we did we moved here is we built a building for a future store and that's where we lived in that building uh for quite a quite a few for a few years until until we built the house that we're sitting in right now and of course i was still at home so i helped with all those things but uh tell us a little bit more i guess dad about is there anything you want to say about the move down here or the early years of living libya well this is a kind of a really touchy subject because i don't want to offend people and i don't want to get across ways with anybody that thinks we're we're better than them or whatever but there was when after we lived in rexford for a number of years we had the authorities from the east came out and they changed the whole philosophy we could no longer uh assemble like we were before we had to only come together every two weeks which was the norm in indiana and so that's it's kind of kind of amish tradition to just church every two sunday every other sunday instead of every sunday so that was just things like that just didn't really uh so i i just didn't i didn't want to come against the system and try to book it because there's one person against the whole system just doesn't work and i knew that and i couldn't so i said well we'll just move so when it when the thing is right and god provided a place here in libby montana i didn't dream my wildest dream was never that i'd see uh my our log home grow like it has here and that was way beyond my my normal dream and but it wasn't man that put it that made that happen it was a higher power and and that's where the credit goes you know that we are able to and we we're not here to boast about that either we things can change so quickly we have learned over the years that we can't put our trust in our own thinking our own ability there's a higher power that that will determine that yeah so i guess one thing i hear dad saying here is you know when they moved to libby here and dad's been here now since 92 so it's been wow i guess it's coming up on almost 30 years you know i guess i hear dad saying that you know maybe there's some things that that he would have done different but i i just i know that each generation has their own obstacles to face and each generation has their own battles to to win and and ground to break and pioneer through and you know i think it's dad's heart as well as you know his father's heart and my heart that each generation we don't have to go through those same struggles the same battles the same pioneering places but we can move the next generation can go on from where we left off and and now when we look at that generation a lot of times i think we think you know it's not quite the way we would have done it um and i know my children are probably going to do things differently than i would do them or maybe wish they would be done but i think that's where i hear dad saying there's uh you know he's real he's released his children and those others to to walk in those places that him and mom you know weren't able to walk or they fulfilled where they were supposed to walk in and now it's us to us to us children to walk in this time and then at some point it's going to be our children so and each generation is going to is going to perceive things a little bit differently and hear god um strategize a little bit differently and so i think it's i'm thankful that dad has that uh ability to bless us and to um you know set us free and and walk in where we where we need to walk but is there anything else dad you want to say about anything that comes to your mind well there's a lot of things i could talk about but but i think we made it long enough and and maybe as things come up later on i might do it again so if you guys really enjoyed this and you want to hear more i mean dad could sit here for hours and days telling stories and while we're talking about that well if you if you enjoy this and you want more just comment in the description box below and if there's enough of you that say please then maybe at some point we'll do another one but talking about dad's stories i'm going to put a plug in for dad some of you i think i talked about a year ago i talked about this already there's this book right here it's called growing deep roots and i don't know if you can see that but dad actually wrote that book and um that is uh kind of some of dad's story and it's about you know growing up amish and and his stories of growing up so a lot of good stories in here if you guys are interested in this book i know it would help out dad and uh i think you'd i think you would enjoy it it's a lot a lot of good stories it's kind of self-published so it's not um it's very um kind of raw form but it's it's a great book and just go on you can find it on amazon and and i'll put the link below if you guys want you can just click on the link and it'll take you right through and you can buy the book and you have it in a couple days unfortunately you it'll be uh past christmas time but you can still get it and maybe read it through the winter or whenever so yeah a lot a lot of stories in here so all right i just want to say thanks dad for taking the time and and doing this we're just thankful that we have dad and mom and with us still and so it's a real blessing so thank you so much for watching well i have to say uh we sure certainly appreciate what the children have done for us too it's beyond words we can't we can't explain any words so yes we're grateful i think it goes both ways so we're thankful for mom and dad and we're grateful that they're thankful for us so um yes thanks for watching montana haven hope you enjoyed this uh little video and god bless you and we'll talk you we'll talk with you on the next video [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Montana Haven - Alaska Edition

Views: 40,980

Keywords: Miller, Joas, Amish, Farm, Family, Homestead, Montana, Montana Homestead, Homesteading, Growing up Amish, Ora Miller, Orpha Miller, My father’s story, My fathers story, Libby Montana, Rexford Montana, West Kooteney, West Kootenai

Id: 070oe55iAOc

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 15 2022