Family Reunion

Last weekend, Tom and Iain and I went to Dallas, North Carolina, for the Rhyne Family Reunion.  It was interesting and I'm glad I went - a room full of people at a Lutheran church in Dallas, most of whom I am very distantly related to, but none of whom I've ever met before.  There has been an enormous amount of work done over the years by a lot of different people, so it's not so hard for most Rhyne descendants to figure out where they fit into the family tree (although there are way too many Jacob Rhynes, and there is some confusion about which one's which, for a few of them).  We put colored dots on our name tags on Saturday, to indicate which branch of the Rhyne family we are from - Iain and I had an orange dots, as a descendants of Johan Philip Rhyne, my great-great-great-great-grandfather.  (Some people had multiple dots, since there was lots of intertwining of branches of family trees in the past.)  There were photos taken for each group of descendants; Johan Philip had a medium-sized group, but I think for some of them there was no one there at all.  There were photos of the oldest person there (age 99) and of the kids who were there.

I lived in North Carolina for three years, during the 1980s.  I had no idea, at the time, that if I were to look far enough back, I had ancestors who came there when it was still a British colony.  (There are other North Carolina connections too - the Smiths weren't far from Gaston/Lincoln County, and I have wondered if there might be some intertwining in my own family tree.)

I remember, years ago, having breakfast in a hotel dining room with a coworker who told me about her family's reunions.  Every year there was a big event attended by the entire extended family.  It sounded like fun to me, although I feel like I'm doing well to keep in touch with my cousins by email.  My children have said - incorrectly - that "they have no relatives" since their grandparents have all died and neither Tom nor I have surviving siblings, or any nieces or nephews.  Before the Rhyne reunion, Sarah asked if we would come home with T-shirts.  I said I didn't think so.  (For the record, we didn't; it was a no-T-shirt reunion, although I suppose it's not too late to make one if we want one.)

The part that interests me about all this is less how far I can trace things back (the farther back you get, the less you know about the people), but the stories.   My grandmother, born in Indian Territory, was the oldest of 6 children; at age 14, she drove the family's second covered wagon into Greer County (now Oklahoma, but I think it was part of Texas then).  Her father Joel is said to have been a handsome man with curly black hair and a mustache; he lived with his family in many different places and moved around a lot.  Was he always looking for opportunities or getting away from something?  A child is buried in Arkansas; the family briefly moved to Oregon, but then they returned to Oklahoma; he died in Texas.  He's named after his father's nephew who died at the siege of Port Hudson during the Civil War.   There are towns that flourished and then faded away, as agriculture and transportation changed.

When Gaston County was split off from Lincoln County, Dallas became the county seat, and was a thriving town in the mid-nineteenth century.  But the railroad didn't go through Dallas (at least according to Wikipedia, the county commissioners refused to appropriate funds to build bridges across the creeks because they thought the trains would awaken people at night and frighten the livestock) and in 1911 the county seat was moved to Gastonia.  We visited Moses Rhyne's store, built in 1850, and the old Hoffman hotel, that is now the Gaston County Museum.

The former Hoffman hotel, now the Gaston County Museum

The Moses Rhyne store, now an antique shop

  
There was a guest speaker at the reunion, who talked about her grandmother making quilts, and all the memories that were in those quilts - bits of cloth from clothing she remembered - and how she now makes quilts for her own family, sewing into them names and dates.  I wish I had done a better job of capturing somehow the stories my parents told me, and that I had asked more questions, and that I had written down the answers.  But absent that, there are still stories to learn.  This time, I do need to write them down.