Reunion!

We are to have a family reunion in June, but I feel as if I'm already there!  Family members have been posting old photographs and pictures on Facebook, some of which I've never seen and others that bring back such nostalgic memories!

A niece who does extensive genealogy searches has shared documents she has unearthed of our family's history!  I even found my name on a 1940 census!  I was less than one year old, but there I was along with my older siblings of ages 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11!

She has found a connecting thread to my paternal grandfather, who disappeared when my father was a young child.  The names under a formal photograph of a couple identified as Daddy's aunt and uncle swirled and surfaced in my murky memory as I remembered him mentioning "Aunt Sarah and Uncle Hardie." It was their 1880 wedding portrait, in which they were stiffly posed in their finery, fashionable dress of the day.

There was another picture, this one of my maternal grandfather as a young man.  If I ever saw it I don't remember it, although it does look vaguely familiar.  I just remembered him (on the one occasion I saw him) as old and ill, looking nothing like the handsome, dapper figure in suit and tie looking quite contemporary in the 1880s.  I could see my mother in him.

There was the imposing brick building identified as the school my older sisters had attended.  We younger kids went to the newer school by the same name built later.  My brother remembered it in a post by saying that's where he told the tall tale in front of the class of the elaborate presents he got for Christmas.  We were very poor.

Old pictures of our youth made me long for the days when I looked so "awful."  Funny how pictures can put things like that in perspective!  What I wouldn't give to be slender, fresh-faced and crowned with thick, luxuriant tresses again!  The dashing, romantic pictures of my oldest brother in his Air Force uniform revived the feelings of family excitement when he came home on leave.  It was like John Boy Walton come home from the war!

Records of our scattered family history may be scarce, but they make me think of the Bible and how the Jews were so careful in recording their genealogies. Generation after generation was painstakingly written down. God chose this people with their fastidious attention to detail for His special purpose of bringing us the Bible and the story of salvation through Jesus Christ. Through Him we will have the opportunity to see our loved ones in Heaven someday when everyone is young and beautiful again.  Now that will be a real family reunion!