'Tis the season for talking about families

The holidays are a time to get together with family and an opportune time to really get the family together.
“When you think about family, you think about heritage,” said Dr. Jay Miller of Eunice. “The holidays are probably a good time of the year to research your family history.”
In the last seven years Miller has traced his family line all the way back to the 16th century, taking up where his dad left off.
“I tagged along with my father, Jack D. Miller, Sr., and Fr. Donald Hebert as a child while those two were doing research for Fr. Hebert’s book ‘Southwest Louisiana Records’ and my dad’s work on his and my mom’s family trees,” Miller said. “After my mom, Anna Fontenot Miller, passed away, I rediscovered a passion for it.”
“So far I have traced multiple lines back to the 16th century. I have many lines further back, some to the 12th-13th century, but citations are lacking. The problem as you go further and further back is the lack of true references. Without cited references, it cannot be legitimate and can only be speculation at best. The likelihood of families being able to trace their ancestry past the 12th or 11th century is highly unlikely unless they are related to nobility.”
For Miller, tracking his family tree branches back to the 16th century translates to going back 12 generations on his paternal grandmother’s side, all the way back to 1569.
“If you go back nine generations, that’s 256 lines you have to trace,” Miller said, laughing. “If you go back 17, that’s around 1,200. The number of lines just increases exponentially.”
Paternally a Miller, once spelled Mueller, means the researcher is of an Alsacian-Germany lineage, as well as a Guillory, which is French. Miller’s maternal branches stem off to Fontenot, also French, and McGee, which is Irish.
When one imagines starting off on the journey of heritage, traveling and trips abroad often come to mind, but one modern marvel has truly made the art of family tree-making much easier than it was in the past.
“I’ve only (done) local travel,” Miller said. “The beauty of 2014 is Internet makes the world available at home.”
In picking up the trail where his dad left off, Miller joined ancestry research web sites like www.ancestry.com and www.genealogybank.com and conducted searches on several other websites as well. Miller also used more than 25 books, including some of family trees and others that served as how-to guides, in his quest to map out his lineage.
According to Miller the most useful web site for general genealogy work is www.ancestry.com, and the best books for his particular search were Fontenot Family 1600-1903: A Genealogical Study of the Descendants of Jean Louis Fontenot Dit Colin and Louise Angelique Henry by John A. Young and Jacob Miller Louisiana Family, Vol, I, II, III and Jacob Miller Photos By Murphy Miller.
“Ancestry.com is the best for organization,” he said. “I can snap a picture of a family headstone, and with the app on my phone, it is saved to my account.”
Memberships to such web sites as well as Miller’s membership to the Louisiana Historical Society and the purchasing of books are where costs for searching a family tree come into play. Prices for membership to www.ancestry.com start out at $19.99 for a month of U.S. Discovery access and top out at $199 for a year of World Explorer Plus access.
“The biggest cost is personal time involved,” Miller added.
In addition to book and internet research, Miller also spent time visiting cemeteries and local libraries, which have reference books and genealogy information.
“Library searches take me the longest because I always find more information,” he said. “Keep good cited records and understand evidence.”
“The bulk of the work was completed in the first two years of my research. You usually find all the treasures early on in the search. The further back you go, the less there is to find.”
One the many pearls discovered by Miller include the likely beginning of the Creole line of Guillorys from the Opelousas area.
According to information gathered by Miller, the line began with four children born to Joseph Gregoire Guillory, one of Miller’s fifth great-grandfathers, and an African slave he owned named Marguerite. Guillory lived on the eastern end of Dauphine Island, Ala. with his wife and their eight children. After his wife died in 1764, Guillory, his children and his slaves, including Marguerite, who was pregnant with their first child, moved to the Opelousas Post. Between that time and 1770, Marguerite bore four of Guillory’s children, including at least two sons. Documentation of the children as well as their fight for freedom can be found in “The Margarita Case: Historical Perspectives on a Controversial Case in 18th Century Louisiana” in the Louisiana Bar Journal, Volume 31, Number 2.
“Almost all the Creole Guillorys in the area can be traced back to Marguerite,” Miller said.
In his quest to trace his family history, Miller also shed light on the age-old question: where do all the Fontenots come from?
“It all goes back to one guy,” Miller said. “He had eight sons and four daughters.”
According to his research, Miller’s sixth great-grandfather Sergeant Jean Louis dit Colon Fonteneau (The spelling was likely changed to its current spelling by the Spanish census authorities), was born in 1686. In 1720, he left Poitiers, France and was assigned to Fort Conde near Mobile, Ala. In 1726 he met and married a young widow. They had 12 children together before Jean Louis died at Fort Toulouse, where the family had later moved to, in Oct. 1755. His widow and children remained there until the fort changed hands to the British in 1763. The family then moved west and settled on land grants in Spanish controlled Louisiana. After a short stint in the area of Pointe Coupee, all of the sons and their families settled in the vicinities of Opelousas, Chataignier, Ville Platte and Church Point.
Miller was also interested in highlighting his surname due to the number of local descendants.
“There are just so many Millers in this area,” Miller said. “Mention these three names -- Miller, Fontenot and Guillory -- and you would probably have the interest of 50 percent of the people in Eunice.”
A little more than one column of the current Eunice phone book is dedicated to the surname, which was brought to the area by Jacob Mueller, Miller’s fifth great-grandfather. Originally from France, Miller and his wife, their four daughters and one son boarded a ship from Maryland to Louisiana with 14 other families. 
Neither the pilot nor the captain of the ship were able to find the mouth of the Mississippi River, and they later wrecked near Matagorda on the coast of Texas. The passengers were held hostage at a Spanish fort for several months, but they were eventually released and sent with guides to Natchitoches, the closest post to the Spanish fort. The family eventually settled in present-day St. John the Baptist Parish, known as the Second or Upper German Coast, before moving to the Opelousas District.  
Imperial St. Landry Genealogy and Historical Society member Alma Reed also discovered a surprise while tracing her family’s lineage, and she traveled all the way to London to verify the find.
“About 12 generations back, I have a male ancestor who was an attendant to Mary, Queen of Scots,” Reed said. “I visited the London Genealogy Society, and there was documentation that he had helped her escape from Loch Leven Castle. He then disappears (from historical records), and years later, he pops up in England with an Anglicized name.”
Reed started tracking her ancestry in the 1970s, right after high school.
“My family told stories all the time,” she said. “I wanted to validate those stories.”
Reed has been instrumental in helping set up the Eunice Public Library’s genealogy room, and the room should be ready for use in the next few weeks. Between the Eunice and Opelousas public library’s genealogy sections, there are about 850 books, with the majority of the tomes housed at the Opelousas location. Both libraries have sets of Father Herbert’s books.
“You can look at the (Father Hebert) books and work your way back,” Reed said. “They are a great skeleton for tracing back, and they tell where further records can be found.”
“They are the epitome of local genealogy work.”
In addition to using resources at local libraries, Reed also frequents Clerk of Court offices for her searches.
“You can look up tax records, conveyance records, marriage records, lists of veterans from the parish and census records,” she said. “There are lots of things to find there.”
“The Internet is also a big help. In the last 20 years of searching on the Internet, I learned much more than I did in 40 years of looking through books. I found distant cousins working on same family lines, and we connected online.”