Reunion
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
In the summer of 2019, I began to think about planning a reunion for one set of extended family – specifically, the descendants of my 3rd great-grandparents, Spencer and Martha Pease Arnold of Appleton, Maine, and Licking County, Ohio. One of my first steps was to organize a Facebook Group called “Descendants of Spencer and Martha Pease Arnold” and to invite all of the family members I knew about. There were a lot of descendants; the descendants’ tree (I made a separate tree on Ancestry for these collateral relatives) soon included almost 2,000 individuals, but I was able to build it only down to my generation – myself and my 4th cousins or thereabouts. But most of these 4th cousins have children and grandchildren, and it has proven much more difficult to document these families.
For one thing, census records for the years after 1950 are not publicly available, so I have to find other sources of information. Newspaper articles – specifically, obituaries and marriages – give a lot of information. Find-A-Grave often gives information about family members that is not readily available in official records. Land records and probate records are often available, as well as social media profiles. Facebook and LinkedIn can be very helpful, although I have found that there is a fine line between research and stalking.
As I was building this tree and interacting with the Descendants of Spencer and Martha Pease Arnold Facebook group, I began chatting with one of my newly-discovered second cousins about a possible reunion of a subset of these descendants – the descendants of Miles Arnold, the second son of Spencer and Martha. We began talking about a possible reunion of these descendants in the spring of 2021 – the 200th anniversary of Miles’s birth on February 9, 1821.
We started talking about where we could hold the reunion. Miles moved to Hancock County, Illinois, in the 1870s. This is where he died in 1899, and it’s where all of his children grew up. My father was born in Hancock County in 1918, and many (although not all) of Miles’s descendants still live in states adjacent to Hancock County. But there is not all that much to see if we have a reunion there, and we began to talk about alternative locations.
Our first choice was Atlanta, Georgia, because it was the site of probably the most significant event in Miles’s life. He was a member of the 76th Ohio regiment in the Civil War, and his unit participated in the Battle of Atlanta in July of 1864. Specifically, Miles was wounded and left for dead on the battlefield on July22; it was only on the next day, as the Union army was collecting its dead from the battlefield, that Miles was discovered to still be alive. He was given medical treatment and dismissed to go home for the rest of his recovery.
This event marked Miles (and his family) for life. When he got home, his wife Rilla nursed him back to health (although he was identified as an invalid for the rest of his life), and the family embarked on a series of moves that took them to Illinois, back to Ohio, to Kansas, and then back to Illinois, where they settled in Hancock County in 1875.
We were well into planning this reunion for the spring of 2021 when COVID derailed our plans in 2020. We soon realized that it wasn’t possible to make long-range plans so long as COVID remained as untreatable and unpredictable as it was turning out to be. Since the vaccine meant that COVID restrictions could be, more or less, in our review mirror, we could start planning this reunion again.
A good date would be 2025 – 150 years after Miles and his family settled for good in Hancock County. We could revisit the location decision also. I’m beginning to think it might be more interesting to be in Hancock County. There are locations, courthouses, churches, and schools relevant to the family history. There are not very many hotels or meeting spaces in the area, but some of the interested folks still live in the area and they could help put this together.
So this is not exactly about a reunion; it’s about a possible reunion. But it’s all I got.
At my age, sooner is better.
Atlanta or Hancock County would be fine with me.