I sat in the corner and surveyed the room, bearing witness to it erupting with an energy that alternated between equal parts adoration and torrential bursts of laughter, the smile that stretched across my face could have served as its own heat source.
It was obvious that the people in this room had an affinity for each other – after all they were family. Being related typically engenders an environment like this – but the irony that many of the people in the room didn’t know each other just a few short months ago didn’t seem to matter in the least.
The people that I’m alluding to are my family and somehow I was the inadvertent architect of our gathering.
It began innocently enough with an essay that I was writing about my Grandmother that took on a life of its own. Using census records, National Archives, oral family histories in concert with Ancestry.com I was able to connect the dots of a scattered family history.
But – it was the creation of a Facebook group that was the watershed moment as we grew from roughly 10 people into a collective of a couple hundred in less than a year.
I never would have never imagined that my words would whip the winds of family into a movement that would lead to many of us convening in one place, to lay the ground work for an even grander effort – an All Family Reunion.
Over the course of a day and a half, whenever I gazed into the sea of faces who shared my love of family – I couldn’t help but to realize that I was a wealthy man.
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That’s really wonderful! There is nothing like knowing who your people are. I am blessed to know so many of my family members now that I would not have known had it not been for my grandmother. Many other family members can’t say the same and wouldn’t know their other cousins, etc. if they passed them on the street. That makes me sad. Anyway, kudos to you!
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Priceless and worth it’s weight in gold!
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