#10 (catch up)  Minnie Bell Mills, my great grandmother on my mothers maternal side, was born 8 March 1873 in Farmland, Indiana. The Mills were some of the original settlers of the area back in the early part of that century, along with the Wrights, which were her husband’s family.

Minnie Bell was the eldest of ten children of Jacob Riley Mills and Mary A Roberson. She lived a fairly comfortable life for the area and the times. He father owned a large property which included Mills Lake. He stocked it with fish. People would travel from the nearby towns to picnic on the banks and fish. In the winter, he gathered ice and packed it away to sell during the warmer months. They would have worked hard but never gone hungry or without anything they really needed.

Then she met that darned Wright boy, Everett Emerson. LOL They married and had six children when he decided they should pull up stakes and move to Oklahoma. He had traveled there as a young man and always wanted to go back. The family story goes that he was “adopted” by a local indian chief while he was there. (Why is it that it is always a chief. The indian ne’er do well never adopts anyone.) He felt like he could make a better life there so they moved away from her nice life in Indiana to farm in Oklahoma. They went on to have six more children in Oklahoma. They were very poor. She worked alongside him in the fields.

She was a tiny woman. I remember seeing her once when she was sick in bed with shingles. She looked like a child lying there in her bed. She died on 16 February 1967 in Vinita, Oklahoma. She had been a widow for eight years.