The theme for Week 1 in 2024’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge from Amy Johnson Crow is “Family Lore.”
In the 2010 US Census, the surname Milne is low-ranked in frequency; as a matter of fact, it’s number 5,555 in the top 6,000 last names. In 2010, there were only 6,258 Americans with the name, or about 1 in 47,000 people. In Scotland, about 1 in 470 people is named Milne, or 100 times as many.
So with a name like this, infrequent but not entirely rare, it’s pretty common to encounter people who, when first learning our name, says something like, “Do you know Ted/Kathy/Al Milne? I used to work with…” So far, I’ve never known the person they mention, but I’ve got decades to go. It could happen.
More often, what people ask is, “Are you related to A.A. Milne? Do you have a family connection to Winnie the Pooh?” And, growing up, my dad’s answer to that was, “Yes, we Milnes are all related, but he’s a distant relative.” So that was the answer we all repeated. Turns out that if it’s a distant relationship, it’s distant by unrecoverable centuries of births.
This question was one of the first that motivated me to work on genealogy–way back in 1985 or so. All we knew for certain was that our grandfather, Alex Milne, was the immigrant. He had come to Michigan from Aberdeen, Scotland. The lore said he was a ship stowaway (in reality, this seems unlikely; he came to the U.S. about 1902 with his father, and his stepmother, sister, and brother came later). Born in 1887, he had first lived in Terre Haute, Indiana before he married our grandmother Emily Trombley in 1913 in Michigan. They were married until his death in 1972, and had 11 children. He was a baker by trade, and, I discovered so was his father, who was also Alex Milne (1859-1916). It turned out that his grandfather, yet another Alex Milne (1838-1875), worked both as a seaman and an agricultural laborer. Preceding those three generations of Alexander Milnes was James Milne (b. 1799; d. after 1851), a master shoemaker whose own father was also named James Milne. I can rattle off these facts about five generations in a single paragraph, but they required almost 40 years of research in the US and Scotland, and most of the detail came in the last decade or so with the explosion of online records.
In Scotland in 2010, at the Aberdeen & North-East Scotland Family History Society, I learned, first of all, the local and original pronunciation of my name. While our family has always said MILL-knee, in Aberdeen, where the name is exceedingly common, it is pronounced MILL, with the tiniest final whisper of an ‘n’ (but you could ignore the ‘n’ and sound perfectly correct). And I found that Alex Milne was as common a name as, say, Bob Miller in the U.S. I was soon so distracted by finding and evaluating the records of my grandfather’s family that I forgot all about A.A. Milne.
After becoming more familiar with how to research Milnes in northeast Scotland, I did begin to wonder again about A.A. Milne. But also by then a simple Wikipedia search could tell me an awful lot of basics, and none of them led to the paths of my Milne family. Alan Alexander Milne, the father of Christopher Robin, was born in London in 1882 (he was of my grandfather’s generation, though five years older). His father, John Vine Milne, was born in Jamaica, not Aberdeen! I gave up the game: we would already have to be back around the early 19th century to find a link in Scotland. Pooh-FF! went any ideas about being related to Winnie the Pooh.
Giving up the game, however, often turns out to be a useful strategy in genealogical research. There’s always a productive trail to follow, and while you’re following some other trail, the original one often begins to bloom with the products of other people’s research. So it is with A.A. Milne’s genealogical history. While this educated man born in London seemed a world away from my grandfather’s family in the fishing town of Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, in fact, A.A.’s own grandfather, William Milne, was born in 1815 in Banffshire. Banff is a neighboring county to Aberdeen, and James Milne, my great-great-great grandfather, worked there as a shoemaker in the 1840s. What’s more, it appears that A.A.’s earlier forebears also lived in nearby Kincardineshire, where my shoemaker James was born in 1799. (See A.A.’s ancestors at the Family Search tree, e.g.)
As with so many family stories, then, the search goes on, though this one may not be resolve-able. So many families with so many children with such similar naming patterns! For the masses of farm laborers in pre-industrial Great Britain, individual and family records are often non-existent. Where they do exist, they’re often sketchy and don’t provide all the information that would permit a clear conclusion. But the interesting point for me is how the oral lore may indeed have held a grain of truth: the Milnes of the region may indeed all be related, and they knew it. There may even have been, not so long ago, family wisdom about how the generations are related. I wanted to pooh-pooh the Pooh link, but as of now: it’s inconclusive.
My parents did, by the way, decide to have the last word on relationship to A.A. Milne. They named the last of their eight children Andrew Alexander. So in that way, yes, we are in this genereation closely related to A.A. Milne!
Rootedness 