Descendants of Ocean City's First Resident Still Live in Town

If every picture tells a story, then Frank Allen's house tells the story of Ruth.

The only surviving fourth-generation descendant of Parker Miller, Ocean City's first permanent resident, Allen lives in a two-story Wesley Avenue home where black-and-white and sepia-toned photographs of ancestors line the staircase wall. But it is the more recent color photos of his late wife, Ruth, that he shows with the most pride.

Ruth, Allen's accompanist in life and in the church music they both enjoyed so much, died in June 2010, after 52 years of marriage.

"She'd play and I'd sing," he says of an avocation that included touring with a Christian group.

Admittedly "on the bashful side," Allen says he didn't have a date until after he graduated high school, one of the 90 members of Ocean City's Class of 1947. A chronic chronicler of almost everything, Allen says by the time of his 50th high school reunion in 1997, 23 of his classmates were deceased.

Keeping track of people and tracing his genealogy is something Allen says he does "out of curiosity." He certainly has a lot to be curious about.

"I've traced my father's side to the Civil War and my mother's side to the Revolutionary War, but I can't get back to the Mayflower," says Allen, 82. In researching his lineage, he learned his paternal great-grandfather was thrice married and that he may be distantly related to the Lake brothers, who named and later incorporated Ocean City.

Despite paying his annual dues to participate in the Lake family reunion that is held yearly in Ocean City, Allen never attended until this year's hurricane-delayed event took place in October.

"I felt like an imposter," he says.

His storied family history makes this unassuming man the equivalent of Ocean City royalty. His roots run deep: Parker Miller, his maternal great-grandfather, was the oldest of 17 children, a man who came to live on the island in 1859 while working as an agent for marine insurance companies. The Lake brothers arrived in 1879, 20 years after the island was already populated with Millers.

Allen was born in 1929 in a house at 1046 Asbury Ave. but grew up at 705 Central Ave. When he was 6 years old, his grandmother, Elizabeth Miller Voss (daughter of Parker Miller), broke her hip in the home that had been built for her in 1891 by her new husband, John Voss. Allen's mother, Elmira Voss Allen (Parker Miller's granddaughter), moved her family back to the ancestral home in the mid-1930s in order to help her mother. As Allen's siblings were 13, 15 and 17 years older, one of his clearest memories of his childhood in that home is the amount of time he spent playing by himself.

Today, 705 Central Ave. is occupied by Allen's only niece, Betty Ann DeBaufre Powell, a fifth-generation descendant of Parker Miller. Another fifth-generation descendant, Tracey Allen, one of Allen's three nephews, lives in town, too. There are no sixth- or seventh-generation Miller descendants living in Ocean City.

The direct line from Parker Miller, through Elizabeth Miller Voss to Elmira Voss Allen to Frank Allen, ends with Allen. Because he and Ruth did not have children, Allen says he feels he and his wife were drawn even closer. They performed together for years in churches, she as the organist or pianist, he as a tenor. Today, there is sheet music on her piano in the dining room, and her organ occupies a place of prominence in the living room. Allen still sings weekly with the Praise Team and rehearses weekly with the Linwood Community Church as he prepares for that church's Dec. 18 performance of "Night of The Father's Love."

"I learn the notes just fine, but the words I have problems with," he confesses of some of the songs. He admits he hides an index card with the words on it in the palm of his hand.

This year, after a two-year break, Allen returned to performing with the Osborns Plus, a Christian singing group that started recording in the early '70s. Ever the chronicler, he has all of the group's vinyl record albums, plus a 25-year anniversary CD.

"I feel like I am doing the Lord's work," he says of his singing.

Ever faithful, Allen believes he and Ruth, whom he met when they were both 27 and married when they were both 29, will be reunited. They first met when Ruth, whose family owned a summer home in Ocean City, accompanied her parents on a trip to purchase furniture at Brownlee's, where Allen worked after graduating from high school. He retired 22 years ago from a 23-year career at the Post Office; Ruth retired around the same time from her bank job as an assistant cashier at 13th and West.

One of Ruth's paintings, of a countryside with red barn and winding dirt lane, hangs in Allen's dining room. He's named it "My Road of Life" and lately, he sees it as a metaphor for the path he is traveling.

"Sometimes, we have our ups, and sometimes, we have our downs," he says. "Eventually, we go over the last hill and we go to the Lord."