Toni Jamie Miller, 78, formerly of Canton

Toni Jamie Miller of Unity, New Hampshire passed away on September 28, 2024 at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center at the age of 78. Jamie, as she was always known to friends and family, was born October 27, 1945 in Canton, N.Y.

She was predeceased by her parents, Douglas & Sylvia Angus, both professors of English literature, who cultivated a love of writing, reading and art in Jamie from an early age. She was also predeceased by her first husband, Archibald Miller, a well-known artist and sculptor and by her second husband, Jim Smith, who was a master carpenter. She is survived by her brother, Chris Angus of Canton; and her nephew, Callum Angus of Portland, Oregon; as well as Jim’s son, Michael Thomas Smith, with whom she was close. She is also survived by her cousin, Alan Snitow and his daughter Tania Chelnov-Snitow and her cousin Norma Pomerance and her two sons, Nathaniel and Aaron Pomerance-Williams.

Jamie grew up in Canton, N.Y. She worked in St. Lawrence University’s old red horse barn as a teenager, beginning her lifelong love of animals. When she was thirteen, she bought her first horse, Captain, and kept him in the barn behind her family home on West Main Street. In the years before Canton had the traffic of today, she would ride Captain down Main Street and up Park Street to the red barn.

Showing a proclivity for intellectual pursuits, Jamie graduated early from Canton High School and enrolled at the University of Rochester at the age of sixteen. She graduated from The University of Rochester with a B.A in History in 1967 and an M.A. in Education in 1971. She was an editor at Dial Press in New York City before earning a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology at Central Michigan University in 1978. She worked at various jobs as a teacher, book editor, free-lance writer and commercial photographer before working as a therapist for nearly forty years in Claremont, N.H.

She loved animals her entire life, raising horses, sheep and llamas, while restoring a 230-year-old home with her husband Jim near Unity, N.H. Their home became a popular destination for families and children who came to visit the animals and swim in her beautiful pond. She also kept an abundant garden of flowers and vegetables throughout her life, as gardening was one of her passions.

Jamie traveled to her summer home in Nova Scotia, where her father was born and where she spent many happy summers sea-kayaking the offshore islands and where she found more animal friends, the seals, who came up to her craft. She was also fascinated by genealogy and spent many years cataloguing her ancestral roots in Nova Scotia and in Russia with the help of relatives and friends.

There will be no services. The family requests that a gift be made in her honor to any organization that helps animals.