It is like counting great riches looking back at the first reunion in 25 years of my grandparents’ descendants. All 11 of their grandchildren came. All but four of their great-great-grandchildren came. The great-grandchildren and spouses registered in with a 68 percent turn-out. The no-shows had to defend a doctoral thesis, recuperate from an illness or work to pay all those expenses of being young and just starting out.
Yet, in spite of all that, 70 of James and Harriet Hibbard’s 94 descendants, their spouses and children flew, drove or hitched rides to Steuben County, N.Y. from California, Maine, Michigan, Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Slovenia, Europe. Many of us had not seen each other at all through for the past 20 or 30 years. During those years we also tallied up family members who, at one time or another, lived or went to school in New Mexico, Colorado, Alaska, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Ohio and Puerto Rico.
Some simply came to the reunion site from their homes in New York. Others bunked with relatives, rented hotel rooms, set up RVs or put up a tent. We camped out – along with my sister’s family – and enjoyed quiet early mornings by the lake and one miserable late night wishing someone would PLEASE call it quits with the DJ and recorded music at the pavilion.
My husband loves statistics and I play Math games in my head, so we spent early morning hours in our tent mentally counting up how many came for the Fourth-of July gathering. My father’s health and physical condition prohibited him from attending, but 85 percent of his 58 descendants came. My aunt, with family flung half-way around the world still managed to get 56 percent there and two-thirds of my late uncle’s family made it to the barbecue dinner as well as three of my father’s elderly cousins – and their husbands.
The first night, we converged on the old farm place in the foothills of New York State where my grandparents had lived and farmed through Great Depression to retirement. My late uncle carried on the farming tradition until health issues closed the barn doors. My aunt and a couple cousins still live there, but, no other descendant entered farming. Instead, the 11 Hibbard grandchildren all went away to one type of school or another to study pharmacy, education, ministry, engineering, cosmetology, welding, business administration and music. Some still work in their original areas of training. Others have diversified into office cleaning crew, truck driver, newspaper writing and, of course, lots of years as homemakers for the six granddaughters. The great-grandchildren have added to the variety of occupations: banking, acting, interior design, Air Force officers, piloting, electrician, jeweler, building trade and several in computer related professions.
My sister handed out name tags to identify everyone and afterwards commented that she had met all but one.
I met everyone because with my son’s and brother’s help, I took the official family group shots. Before I started clicking away, my business-minded sister wrote down a list for me to check-off to insure I photographed everyone.
For days after the reunion, I studied, sorted, organized and copied pictures onto the Internet for all the Hibbards to see. My husband laid out a family tree on the computer.
As I look at the family tree and pictures and remembered the commitment of 75 people to return to their roots in a small village hidden in the hills of New York, I know the truth of what my mother said about her five children, “We are millionaires five times over.”
She was right, the greatest wealth of all is family.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)