Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Family Reunions

Me with my Uncle Dale Furney and my coousin Rosanne Brueggman in Golden CIty, MO
August 2009
Banta family Renunion
Me posing near the Banta Road sign near Steve's childhood home in NJ,
It was named after my ancestor
         
When  I hear the phrase "Family Reunion" it conjures up all kinds of images.  I think of large extended families where everybody is familiar, kind of like I feel when I visit with all of Steve's brothers and sisters and their kids.  We all know each other and have a shared history even if its an aggregate cobbled together from random scraps accumulating here and there over the years.   I also get a mental picture of an over-sized picnic filled with laughing people  in old fashioned clothes.  I know it comes  from the black and white photos I have of an old Bartley family reunion that took place in Thompson park in Amarillo when my mother was a girl.  By the time I came along we had fallen out of the loop and were no longer attending the reunions assuming they were even still happening.    I had never been to a family reunion until the summer of 2009.  I had just rediscovered my Furney family roots and by extension my Banta family roots.   The Banta's were and still are as far as I know having their annual family reunion in Golden City Missouri.  The year I went I met with my Dad's brother Dale who took me all around West Plains and told me about his life there with my Dad.  The next morning we headed for Golden City to be the first people at a Banta reunion to represent the offspring of Nell Banta Riley, the one child of James Henry Banta who had never had representation at the reunion.  She and hers it seems had also fallen out of the loop.  Her daughter, my Grandmother died young so the connection had been lost for a while.   I was glad to go to the reunion and get Nell's family back into the loop, and I hope  I can  again one day.  I did not know a soul in the building, but still felt oddly at home.  Maybe it was in seeing all the double chins; I guess that must be a  Banta trait;  now I know who to blame...Maybe the ease I felt there was the product of genetic memory, being among people who shared so much of my lineage.  Whatever it was, it was powerful and I liked it.  It was not unlike walking through the old church yard in Hackensack and seeing the headstones of all the people I knew  who were my kin, not creepy in the least despite the tilting headstones and heaving graves.  I felt quite at ease in that ancient burial place.  I guess it comes down to a feeling of belonging. A belonging that is a birthright and  not a privilege, somthing to be either  bestowed or withdrawn, but something that is.  Like Descartes said "I think therefore I am."   I say "I am, therefore I belong."

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