Week 28: Reunion #52Ancestors — Making Sense of it All

My immediate family had our first family reunion in 2017. My wonderful sister-in-law put the event together and we met in Fort Worth, near one of my brothers and his sons. From what I understand, a good time was had by all (your humble author was stuck in her hotel room most of the time with the flu).

In 2018, I took up the mantle and organized a family reunion in the Washington, D.C., specifically to be able to include our 92-year-old Aunt (and family matriarch) and our first cousins. I was overjoyed that our third-cousin once-removed and his wife were also able to join us. I had just recently “met” them over the phone. We made a connection through Ancestry.com as both of us were researching the Michael McDonough family of Maplewood, New Jersey (whom I wrote about on this blog back in May).

When my cousin and his wife came to our dinner, I felt an immediate connection. Although they had never met any of us before, it was like we all had known each other our whole lives. They fit right in with a similar sense of humor and outlook. It was simply amazing to see the family traits manifest in a completely different branch of the tree. After our dinner with the whole group, many of us went back to our hotel where we spent the next several hours sharing our lives and laughing like old friends.

One of the gifts we had for reunion guests were playing cards we had made featuring portraits of our ancestors. My third-cousin took the one of our third great-grandfather Michael and held it up to is face. It was like we were looking at brothers!

While we don’t have a reunion scheduled for 2019, I am hoping that we will be able to get together in 2020. As I work on our family tree, I find cousins all over the U.S. and it is my dream that someday more of the extended family can meet up and make the kind of connections like we had in 2017.