In 1997 John Miller Ball of Atlanta, Georgia and Josephine (Ball) Brokaw of Traverse City, Michigan finished years of compiling the Ball Family Lineage they entitled; A Brief History of the Ball Family; Our Family Line. It relates the family’s migration from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to New York to Michigan and beyond. Also included is a report of Deborah (Ball) Powers, John’s sister, who after the death of her husband, William Powers in 1829 of an oil cloth factory fire, she becomes the first self-made American millionairess by the mid-1800s.