Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Stepping Back in Time.....

My friend Lisa is really in to this whole ancestry thing. I've always thought I'd love to try and research my family, but the last thing I need right now is to take on a new and challenging hobby. This morning, (on a whim) I did a GOOGLE search for my grandfather's name - James Arthur Milham and VOILA! Evidently my Aunt Dorothy's granddaughter has spent a very long time researching the Milham family tree and I was the lucky recipient of all of her hard work. Counting my grandchildren, I now have six generations covered on my dad's side of the family - with every detail you can imagine. Evidently the entire Milham clan started somewhere in England and that is the site where this information is documented and stored.

You can't imagine my surprise this morning, when I clicked on a link and it took me to a website in the UK and THERE is a photo of my grandparents on their wedding day, and a Navy photo of my dad - their 4th child.




This photo is of my great grandparents and my grandfather as a little boy - circa 1888. This might be the first photo I've seen of my great grandparents - William Franklin Milham and his wife Docia. The little boy on the left is the father of the four children on the right - my dad on the far right, along with his sister Dorothy and brothers Jim and Bob.




One interesting fact that was detailed on the website (that I was aware of) was the fact that my grandmother, (after being widowed in 1944) moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan to be close to her youngest son (my Uncle Bob). There, she took a job as a nanny for the children of the Michigan State Senator - Gerald R. Ford. Later, when he became a member of Congress and moved his family to Washington, he asked my grandmother to go with them - but she refused, stating that she wanted to stay close to her family.

UPDATE: I've just dug a little deeper into all the research done by my cousin's wife in Colorado. I've now recovered two more generations - all the way back to my great-great-great grandfather - David Miham born in 1796 in Sussex, England. That's a total of 8 generations from David and Jemima Milham to my six grandchildren, and a span of 212 years. I'm going to print out all of the information and pass it on to my children.

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