Genealogy Insider: Five Questions With Elizabeth Shown Mills

Elizabeth Shown Mills, author of references including Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace and Evidence! Citation and Analysis for the Family Historian (both from Genealogical Publishing Co.), is a force in modern genealogical scholarship. Here, meet the woman behind the books.

 

I’m barefooted, usually. I’m a Southern girl.

 

Isle of Canes (Ancestry). It’s a historical novel. I love it because it’s what genealogy is all about to me: to get into the heart and soul of people, and see what made them tick, what shaped their lives, what efforts they made to create better lives for themselves.

 

We always have brick walls. The most important strategy, especially in Southern research, is the “FAN club” principle: friends, associates and neighbors. Put your family in the context of others to work through your identity problems. The other important strategy is sheer thoroughness—not overlooking anything that exists.

 

Most of us love the culture in which we’re reared. However, my paternal heritage is Northern. What I love is Southern research, because of the challenges that it poses.

 

Did they ever. First, I had the mtDNA test done to prove the family tradition that my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother was a Choctaw Princess. That tradition died in a petri dish in the Houston lab. Then, my son’s Y-DNA test informed us that the Millses aren’t even Millses. We’re a 66-out-of-67 marker match with descendants of one John Witt who settled 17th-century Virginia. When I broke the news to my son, who’s a country songwriter, I informed him that he was officially a half-Witt. His retort? “I’d rather think that’s why I’m so Witty.”

 

From the September 2012 Family Tree Magazine.