My sister, like a lot of people with money and time on their hands, has developed a super interest in genealogy (which is odd as she has no children and could just write “Dead End” on her own branches of the family tree and mine). My sister does not know how to “work the Internet” (her phrase) or any other type of detailed research, so she asked me to do it for her. Specifically she was interested in my father’s mother’s paternal line recently. I think I may have found something that will end her curiosity into distant lines once and for all.
My paternal grandmother was from a family named Milliner and her father was born in 1863, which I already knew and this helped me get back to 1870 census records no problem. The spelling of the surname varies- sometimes it’s Milliner, other times Millner and even occasionally just Miller (the people who took the Alabama Census records weren’t exactly spelling whizzes) but the chances of two families with names that close who live in the same region and both have children named Madison, Moriah, Alonzo and Felix all born in the same years is rather slim.
Anyway, it took some doing to find my grandmother’s paternal grandfather, but I finally found him. I know absolutely nothing of him- no stories are passed down- and I understand why a bit better as he was much older than I was expecting and died when my great-grandfather (his son) was young. He was born about 1798 in Georgia, married three times and littered the earth with psychoaffectively distressed children (that much is in family lore- that the insanity in that branch of the family goes back to before the Civil War) before marrying a much younger woman at the dawn of the Civil War and starting his last family, which included my line.
So here’s what’s interesting- that man’s father, who I will call Frederick Millner, is referenced on Census Records for 1830 and 1840 as being born approximately 1760 in Virginia (1830 lists him as 67 and 1840 as 80, which isn’t uncommon for Census records, especially if they’re getting their info from a family member) and having the occupation of ‘builder’ in 1830. However, there is no record of him in earlier censuses or in earlier records. I could find no mention of a Milliner/Miller/Millner earlier than 1830 who matched his age and description or any of the states associated with him (Virginia, Georgia, Alabama) even though he was 60 years old by the time of the 1820 census.
As a matter of curiosity, though, I did some checking and ended up staying up til 3 am and joining two subscription databases. There is, on one of the databases, a will and the inventory of the estate of one William Milliner who died in 1788 (cool will- it starts “I William Milliner, in low estate bodily but by God’s grace of sound mind, Amen, will that my holdings be divested upon my death in the situations here described”- people just don’t write like that anymore when they bequeathe their land and slaves). In the will, Milliner names his two children (Susanna and Alleck), leaves his son some land on the Green River in Kentucky, interest in a farm in Virginia, two Negro men “Sam and Piper” described as “in their 30s” and his cows. He then leaves his house in Halifax County to his daughter, Susanna, along with his remaining three slaves, a cook named Della (“about 40”), a “livery slave” [I’m assuming this means he tends the horses] named Henry (in his thirties), and… a “cabinet maker” named Fred who is a “mullatto” [sic] (the others are referred to as Negroes or slaves- only for Fred does he specify mulatto) and “about 25 years of age”. He also asks his daughter to give the slaves their freedom at her death or should they ever be able to purchase it.
There has always been a rumor (my grandmother would go into conniptions if it was brought up) that her family crossed the color line. Could it be that this mulatto Fred Milliner was my great-great-great grandfather? They would be roughly the same age (within 5-10 years, which is close enough for government work), both born in Virginia, one’s a cabinet maker and the other a builder (you could easily see one becoming the other),and if Fred was light enough to pass the color line (or claim part Indian ancestry) and gained his freedom through manumission or escape, travelling down to Georgia, a place that was still widely frontier in the early 19th century (hell, it’s still largely frontier in some places) and a great place for a builder as many cities were being built, plus land was being given away in lotteries at that would have seemed not at all a bad move, and a place where you could “forget to mention” that your mom was a light skinned slave and your dad a nameless white man.
Hmm. I can’t prove this is my ancestor of course, but I think it’s cool as hell if he is. I do know that a lot more Southerners have African ancestry than realize it (there’s a lot of “he’s dark cause he’s got Indian blood” explanations in some families [which could be true, but there were a lot of intermarriages between Indians and blacks {many Indians owned African slaves and others took runaways into their tribe}]). My sister, on the other hand, may no longer have any interest in genealogy once I tell her. Whatever the case, I can now watch ROOTS secure in the knowledge that they’re telling my story (but I still don’t see how Levar Burton grew up to be John Amos).
