For much of the background of Tom McMillan or MacMillan take a look at the bio of Hugh Wilson. Like Wilson McMillan was born in Mauchline, learning the game there, seems to have arrived in Dumbarton, with elder brother, John, and younger sister, Annie, and from the Ayrshire town at about the same time as him, 1883/4, and went on to make his footballing name with the town's club immediately following in his half-back footsteps. And there was a reason for the connection. Wilson and McMillan were step-brothers. 

Thomas "Tom" McMillan was born in 1864 so just nineteen or twenty when he arrived in the town that would become his home. He than spent a season with newly-formed Dumbarton Athletic before in 1885 stepping up to The Sons, with which he would stay a decade, in 1887 winning a single cap and otherwise working in the local shipyards as a joiner/cabinetmaker.

But those simple statistics do not do justice the importance of McMillan to Dumbarton Football Club and therefore to Scottish football in general. Until the 1888-9 he played relatively few matches, as did the club itself. However, they included at centre-half the 1887 Scottish Cup Final lost to Hibernian. But that was to change in 1890-91 in the run to another Cup Final, lost once more, and the inaugural year of the Scottish League. In fact he was to captain the club to the shared 1991 League title, its outright winning the following season and such was his influence, after 1895 when he hung up his boots, it took just a season more for it to drop into the Second Division and another for it to resign from the League altogether. 

By retirement McMillan had reached his early thirties but not yet settled. In 1981 he was boarding with his brother and his family, in 1901 with his sister and hers. In fact he did not marry until 1904, aged forty. His bride was Jessie Taylor, fourteen years his junior, who, whilst she was living in Dumbarton, was born in New Cumnock with its own McMillan connections. They were to have five children, but only two, a daughter and son, would live into adulthood and even then be left parentless at twenty-one and fifteen respectively. Having lived in the same house on Dumbarton's Glasgow Rd. their father would die there of heart problems aged sixty-three in 1928, probably to be buried in the town's cemetery, and their mother would follow just a year later in Glasgow at the Western Infirmary, a victim of cancer at just fifty.