B&O Railroad engineer Horace Miller and his wife Alice Keplinger, daughter of a B&O brakeman
Martinsburg native Alice Lee Keplinger, born in 1877, was the only daughter of seven siblings.
Just before Christmas 1886, when she was 9 years old, her father David, a B&O Railroad brakeman, fell from his train at Gaithersburg and was killed instantly as cars ran over his body. He was 44 years old.
Alice's mother, Adelaide, had just given birth to son Charles three months earlier. Besides Adelaide's newborn, she also now had to care for six other children ranging in age from 2 to 14.
Alice stayed in school and was even listed in the newspaper the following spring as having among the best attendance in her class.
At age 17, Alice married 21-year-old Horace Miller, a B&O engineer, in a ceremony at her family's East King Street home.
Three years later, their daughter Madeline was born. When Madeline was very young, just before the turn of the century, the family moved from Martinsburg to Cumberland, Maryland. Alice and Horace's son David was born there when Madeline was 2. They named the baby boy after the father Alice had lost young.
Alice and Horace bought a two-story wood frame home at 827 Virginia Avenue, right across the street from the Cumberland Subdivision, which had been in operation since 1842 as part of the B&O's main line.
In their 50s, they took in their young grandson Harry Lentz, their daughter Madeleine's son from her first marriage.
Their son David also became an engineer.
Alice died at age 77 in 1954. Horace died almost exactly six years later at age 88.
Both of their children died shortly thereafter, when both were in their mid-60s.