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Budget Manager Discovers History Through Her Family

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 2, 2007

Linda Miller never intended to become a genealogy buff. As manager of budget and financial operations for Pasco-Hernando Community College, she's more interested in math than history.

History, she admits, was her least favorite subject in school. How she got interested in genealogy and history is quite a story in itself. For now, let's just say Miller attributes it to the fact that "her family never threw anything away."

In 1951, when she was 4, Miller and her family relocated to Dade City from Iowa. That year or the next, her father, Harlan, and grandfather, Sheldon, opened a feed store, Pasco Farm & Ranch Supply, and the Millers moved into a multifamily home on 13th Street.

Her grandmother, LaNor, owned The Children's Shop, a children's clothing store, in the mid-1950s, and her mother, Fran, owned Grannie Frannie's, a children's clothing consignment shop, in the mid-1970s.

Miller's childhood memories of Dade City are of a small town populated by a few wealthy landowning families, lots of poor laborers and the small merchant class to which her family belonged. Back then, the town had about 3,800 people, and its claim to fame was having "the largest citrus packing plant in the world."

To me, Dade City has always seemed a strange place - more like a movie town than a real one. As someone who has spent her life moving perpetually to cities known for their transient populations, I'm in awe of towns such as Dade City, dominated by families that have been there for generations.

I can't imagine spending my whole life in the same city, let alone the same small town or the same house. It's inconceivable to me that my parents or children would also have been there. It seems positively claustrophobic.

To me, Miller, 60, is the essence of rootedness and stability, having spent the past 34 years at PHCC and 55 years in the Dade City area. Yet when the Millers relocated to Dade City, they were the newcomers, the transients, the outsiders.

"When I was young, I realized I was from Iowa, and I was very aware of family circles," Miller said. "We were aware of who was related to whom."

She felt bad that she had only one set of cousins in a town "where everyone was related to everyone else."

It was Miller's grandparents who were the hard-core genealogists of the family. When they closed the feed store in 1976, they spent the next 10 years traveling the United States searching for their roots.

Her grandmother wrote letters of inquiry on an Underwood typewriter, and the couple would "head off in the Winnebago to track down leads."

They visited courthouses and cemeteries, striking up conversations with people they met along the way in search of distant relations and other family connections.

They took copious notes that ended up cataloged in volumes of ledger books, stashed away in cardboard boxes, where they sat gathering dust for decades.

Miller inherited the research after her grandmother and father died in 1996.

"I got the books because no one else in the family wanted them."

The boxes set Linda on a new path of exploring her family history. She began to study genealogy magazines and learned about the value of building timelines to record her family's past lives.

In the process of digging, she discovered a box of 3,000 slides of old family pictures that record the history of Dade City from the 1950s. She is cataloging and digitizing the images to create a slideshow for the family's children and grandchildren, so they can learn about their roots.

She's also interested in writing a book with her sister about growing up in Dade City before the streets were paved.

After all these years, as Dade City has seen an influx of new people, Miller is considered one of the old-timers. Overall, she's pretty tickled in her new role as a guardian of the past.

"The irony is that I never liked history," she said. "I didn't even know the dates of the Civil War until I was 55."

She discovered her love of the past through her adventures as an accidental genealogist.

"History has come alive for me through my family."

Lynn Rothman can be reached at rothmal@phcc.edu.

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