Miller Beach Pages & Miller Beach History Table of Contents

The Miller Beach Pages are primarily about the local community that I live in. A neighborhood of Gary, Indiana on the beach at the south end of Lake Michigan.

My focus is largely on the history of Miller Beach which is some 50 years older than Gary.

The Chanute Pages

The Chanute Pages came about as a result of the 100 centennial celebration of Octave Chanute's aeronautical experiments on the beaches of Miller. Miller was not a part of Gary in 1896. Gary didn't exist. Chanute was a retired civil engineer living in Chicago who knew more than anyone what had been done around the world in the way of aeronautical experimentation. He came up with the idea of the ridgidly trussed bi-plane in 1896: the design that the Wright Brothers used for their first flyer.

Family History

This image is the banner to my genealogy page. Online genealogy and history has been a hobby of mine since I bought a computer back in 1993, but there are other pages as well that reflect my interest in books and history. The various pages have grown immensely over the years exploring such things as My Quaker Ancestors, my Spicer roots in Dorset, England, and my mother’s roots in America including a Revolutionary War patriot, Captain John Mott. While I have an Ancestry.com Family Tree, most of what I compile is on my computer in Legacy Family Tree software.

A very rare Cara Mia Rose in my garden.

Personal and Miscellaneous

The fourth section of my website is sort of blog like. I've added a Garden page. Following the death of my wife Cara in 2011 I became a gardener by default. I'd always been the laborer but it was "Cara's Secret Garden" and I've worked to keep it, adding a few things like the Cara Mia Rose pictured here.

Also on this site is a rather eccentric examination into the possible retirement home of Sherlock Holmes. You may think Sherlock is a fictional character, but as Laurie King, the author of the wonderful Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mysteries says, "His obituary never appeared in the London Times." There's also a paper I wrote in 1959 on the Oshkosh Woodworkers Strike of 1898, a subject that even in 1959 was not to be talked about in my hometown of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. And a two-part history of St. Francis House in Madison, Wisconsin, where I lived for a number of years as a student and where I was married in 1974.

I hope you enjoy these pages and find them useful.

As an added note, these pages were first created using Microsoft's Front Page, which is no longer supported, manufactured or used. These pages were launched on my birthday in 1995, eight days before Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0. I used Front Page until 2007, when I completely re-did the pages into the asp.net framework and cascading style sheets using Visual Web Developer Express. In 2015 I recoded the pages to make them responsive to the use in tablets and phones. Much of the content remains, but with a lot of editing.