The Next Page / Climbing on the family tree: the joys of searching for your roots
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McMillan's great-great-grandfather, the Rev. William McMillan.
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was county commissioner of Allegheny County from 1897 to 1903, a fact that probably escaped you even if you are an ardent student of local government. It escaped me, too, which is a bit more surprising. He was my great-grandfather.
For a history buff with an almost unhealthy interest in the Civil War, I knew astonishingly little about my own family's history. The only thing my dad ever told me about his World War II military service was that he was "in the Navy, on a ship." I once asked my mom what her father did for a living and she looked at me with a very straight face and replied that he was "in business."
They were lovely people, but they were decidedly uncurious; Thomas McMillan Sr. and Jeannette Murray McMillan lived in the here-and-now and certainly did not share their son's interest in the study of past mistakes, so I trudged on for more than 50 years without knowing where I came from and who came before me.
I would tramp across Civil War battlefields over the years, examining troop locations and monuments, paging through books and maps and charts, and someone would invariably ask me, "Where did your relatives fight?" It began to strike me as odd that I didn't know where they fought, or if they fought at all, or even who they were -- soldiers or not -- and yet I always promised myself that some day, some time in the near future, I would begin to research family history.
Some day was last October.
With the help and encouragement of a local genealogist, Elissa Scalise Powell, and the extensive online resources of the website ancestry.com, I started down a path that has been equal parts riveting, fascinating, head-slapping, jaw-dropping, exhilarating and, at times, emotionally exhausting.
I learned how to find census reports online. I visited county courthouses to copy wills and research land deeds. I sent away to the National Archives for military service records and Civil War pension applications, and I can tell you that even though I slammed into a few brick walls along the way, the discovery of even a single stray clue often unearthed a previously undetected pathway to the past.
First Published August 21, 2011 12:00 am
