Clyde's parents: John Wesley Miller and Tennessee Isabel Gough

Clyde Clifton Miller's parents were John Wesley Miller (June 8, 1868-Feb. 4, 1916) and Tennessee Isabel Gough Miller (March 16, 1877-Aug. 14, 1957 ). They farmed in Yadkin County, N.C.
Clyde Clifton Miller is the sweet, smiling boy in the middle. Those are his parents, John Wesley Miller and Tennessee Isabel Gough Miller, and his sisters, whom we think were Nevada, Viola (Ola) and Thelma. The fact that Clifton and Thelma were barefoot in this portrait is a clue that they were pretty poor.

In addition to Clyde, the family's children were Nevada, who died of diphtheria at age 9; Viola (Ola); Thelma, the mother of Virginia Holcomb Harris; William; Gough; Luther; Jenny; Harvey (Woodrow) and Johnnie, a girl born 3 months after John Wesley Miller's death.
Another view of the family. Now nobody is smiling!
Tennessee Isabel Gough married very young. John Wesley Miller, who had first dated her sister, ran a grocery store in Lone Hickory, which got its name when the census taker came around and needed one and Tennybelle looked at a lone hickory tree and suggested the name, which stuck.
Tennybelle loved bananas, so her husband kept the store well-stocked with them. They lived in a big house in the woods in Yadkin County that had once belonged to Gaither Miller. (In the 1990s, this house, which had been abandoned and was falling apart, was owned by Margaret Wallace, whose mother, Viola (Ola) Miller, had inherited it. Upon Margaret's death in 2003, her daughter, Ginger, inherited it. Lester Miller, a cousin, bought it in 2004 and restored it.)
After John Wesley Miller died of a stroke while working in the fields in February 1916 (his grief-stricken German shepherd died a few days later), Tennybelle, who was pregnant with daughter Johnnie, could not care for all the children. So she kept the two youngest at home to care for, kept the oldest six to do the work, and sent the middle kids, Gough, Luther and Jenny, to the Oxford Orphanage.
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In November 2011, I visited North Carolina and did lots of family research with the help of first cousins David Edwards and Dee Ann Edwards. The two photographs below were taken at the graves of John Wesley Miller and Tennessee Isabel Gough Miller, our great-grandparents, at Sandy Springs Baptist Church Cemetery in Iredell County, N.C.

Below are some even older family graves from this line, at Flat Rock Baptist Church Cemetery in Yadkin County, N.C.: those of William Sandford Gough (1850-1939) and Sarah Anne Fleming Gough (1852-1898), the first of W.S. Gough's two wives. They were the parents of Tennessee Isabel Gough Miller, and my great-great grandparents.

And below, we go back even further, to my (and David and Dee Ann's) great-great-great-great-grandparents, David Jefferson Fleming (1802-1878) and his wife, Eliza Stevenson Nicholson Fleming (1814-1883). They, too, are buried at Flat Rock.