Author of six books and counting!
…published 2007 by Red Deer Press, Calgary...is a history book with a difference. Instead of  starting with dates and explorers, maps and treaties, Millar starts with the story of one Saskatchewan farmer’s long underwear in 1932. Did that underwear get him through enough winters to make a go of his homestead? Did that underwear build the west as much as railways and one room school houses? By the same token, what about his wife? What part did her underwear play in building the west? How did she manage her personal life when it could never be mentioned? How did all the unmentionables affect women’s lives and women’s history? It’s history from the inside out.

Nancy Millar with a corset circa 1930.

 This is the sort of corset my mother wore in the 1930s and 40s. It’s not as tight or as structured as Queen Victoria’s would have been but it nevertheless imposed a certain amount of control. A woman’s body was not intended to roam around unfettered inside her clothing in earlier times; it had to be held in check. So as I tried to figure out how to lace this thing up, I began to wonder- just what did that control do to women over the  last 100 years, say, both physically and psychologically?

That’s how The Unmentionable History of the West started.

Stories from Canadian Graveyards, published 1997 by Fifth House, available from Fitzhenry and Whiteside......In this book, Millar, aka known as the Cheerful Tombstone Tourist, describes the graveyards she found while traveling through Canada’s ten provinces and the Yukon. It’s another way of reading a country’s history. A reviewer in the April/May 1998 Beaver Magazine said of this book,” The book is delightful: Lighthearted but not frivolous, serious but not grave.”

...a tongue-in-cheek look back at “the little house,” the “biffy,” the “John,” you name it. The “hole” truth about those essential buildings, gone but not forgotten! Available from Deadwood Publishing.
...the only book that combines the biographies of Nellie McClung, Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Irene Parlby and Louise McKinney, Albertans who wanted to be Persons according to the BNA Act, with an explanation of the now famous “Persons Case.” Millar was one of the founders of the Famous 5 Foundation in Calgary, responsible for the statues of the Famous 5 in Calgary and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Available from Deadwood Publishing.

....Millar’s first book on graveyards. In this one, she explores Alberta graveyards and the stories they tell. Available from Deadwood Publishing.

....Published in 2004 by Brindle and Glass, Calgary,  a collection of Canadian epitaphs, old ones, new ones, funny and wrenchingly sad.  The only all-Canadian collection. 

By the way, lest you think that a book on epitaphs must be sad, sad, sad, think again. By and large, Canadians are a cheerful lot in our graveyards, partly because we didn’t start erecting gravemarkers and sculpting words on them until the late 1700s, early 1800s, much later than our European cousins. Thus, we missed the days of long epitaphs full of woe and warnings.

 Take the epitaph “ONE OLD TIMER GONE WEST.” That pretty well states the case, doesn’t it, without breaking the strong silent code of the west. Or “ I’M OFF TO THE LAST ROUNDUP.” Not much nonsense there. The first is from a southern AB graveyard, the second from MAPLE Creek, SK. 

 The ultimate in western epitaphs occurs in a graveyard near Edmonton, AB. “HE FEARED GOD, DID NOTHING MEAN, SHOT STRAIGHT AND STAYED CLEAN.” Who could ask for anything more? Mind you, THE FINAL WORD also contains examples of epitaphs that break your heart, that preach and pontificate, that amuse and amaze, that mystify and muse. We Canadians are not as boring as we might think!