Since taking early retirement after 28 years of living and working in the Washington, D.C. - Baltimore area and returning to Ramer, where George was born and raised, he has been pursuing genealogy research to learn about the Milligan surname and the Milligan family, a family that has lived in South Alabama since the early 1800s.

The project started with the research begun by George's mother and several cousins. "They got family members to fill out information sheets for their immediate family members," he says, "and my cousins did a lot of traveling around the area to gather information." George has been working on the project himself since about 2000-2001.

At that time, it was a series of loose sheets of paper for the different branches of the family. To put the information together, George purchased a genealogy software package that allowed him to input the data his family members had gathered and to establish a database of information. Genealogy software programs, a number of which are now available, come with pre-formatted forms, and many of the genealogy Internet sites sell
their own versions. Next, George began doing Internet research himself to find more information.

Many genealogy Web sites exist now, he says, with postings from those searching for information as well as bulletin boards for just about every surname. George recommends visiting these sites periodically to check for newly posted information. "These sites can be particularly helpful if you have family members who have moved out of a certain geographical area," he says.

The software programs can also help find inconsistencies and mismatches in research, he points out. "My great-grandfather’s name was John Greenberry Milligan. There was a Revolutionary War general named Greenberry, and in the early 1800s, before the Civil War, many people would name male children Greenberry, so sometimes you can think you're related, or that you've found someone, but you may learn later that because it was such a popular name, it may be a different person with the same name."

Through diligent research, George has been able to gather many bits and pieces of information, and often goes to census records to begin tracking family members. Federal census records have been kept since 1790, he says.

"If you want to pay for access to information that has been put onto the Internet by commercial companies like Ancestry.com, they will give you an easy interface into the records—but you will have to pay for it," he says. There are bits and pieces of information that can be found, however, on free Web sites. "You may have to do more searching through text documents on the free sites versus having the easy interface through the pay sites," he advises.