Great family reunion

I've been researching my Family History since about 2001, when the 1901 Census first became available and I thought I'd find out where my paternal grandmother was, with her family - to my astonishment, the tiny family house in Commerell Street, Greenwich, where she was living with her large family of siblings and her parents was in a road which we passed, every week, on our journey from North East London to my childrens' music lessons in Trinity College of Music in the Royal Naval College.

I've subsequently found many family connections with Greenwich, an area of London I really didn't know at all, and it has been very strange to walk the streets where my ancestors also walked.

But it was in the overall research that I came across a distant cousin in Australia (he is descended from my great great uncle Charles), and another cousin now in the North of England (descended from another great great uncle, Morris), and we have enjoyed collaborating with research on various family mysteries, some way back when, and some much more recent.

I also came across a memorial site which put me in touch with descendants of my Great Aunt Ivy, and this enabled me to contact some relations of her sons, the boys my cousin John had played with in the 1930's.

The sites I frequent - including Rootschat and Lost Cousins - also helped me find an inveterate researcher of my Pay family, who is connected to me via my greatx5 grandparents John Pay and Hannah Athow. A very remote cousin, but none the less charming for that!

With a deal of negotiation and arrangement, I managed to align a visit from Australia from my Antipodean cousin with an overall family reunion (which one of the family named The PayFest) at my home in Oxford in 2011.

All my closest cousins, together with my brother, and their spouses came - in addition, we had all the remoter cousins I'd tracked down, and mentioned above. Everyone brought family memorabilia, including a Family Bible dated 1848, and luckily the weather was good so we were able to overflow into the garden (a video of my aunt talking about the family, brought by her son, required us all to cram into the sitting room, which looked like a doctor's waiting area with seats inserted into all the available space). I think we were 25 in the end.

Another room was designated the History Area, where I'd laid out the research, the family trees, and shown how we were all connected - although in the end I had to do name labels for the family, on request, to show the degrees of relationship! Everyone had the chance of visiting and looking at all the information.

The man from whom the majority of us are descended was my great x2 grandfather James Pay (1839-1932)

I think we all remain connected via Facebook etc., and still work together on our Family History.

 

Wow how utterly amazing....and how lucky. As i have said before in this forum, i am lucky enough to be in contact with 2 second cousins who have told me so much about my family but i have missed out on past reunions because i didnt know about members of our family. Now many have died or are simply too old to get together. Such missed opportunities! The last time we had a reunion was sadly at the funeral of my uncle some years back. It does often happen that way and the old saying of people only meeting up at weddings and funerals is true. Everyone seems so busy these days and with media being the way many young people connect soon we could be in a position where no one ever meets up in person but simply texts or tweets. Communication is going in a very different direction at the moment.......