[speaker001:] go ahead Vickie
[speaker002:] well um I had planned a very successful cousins reunion I have a lot of cousins and I did that several years ago in fact it was so well received they've been really having a pi fit for me to do it again
[speaker001:] um-hum I've never actually got to plan one but I've came to several back here in Tennessee that uh were planned long distance with people you know because my immediate family is like five states
[speaker002:] um-hum um-hum
[speaker001:] and they've all turned out pretty good and this time we're here for my mother's eighty fifth birthday
[speaker002:] good oh how neat
[speaker001:] and we had a big dinner today about thirty people and
[speaker002:] uh-huh is it going to be over a several day period or was it over several
[speaker001:] uh well the birthday was today and tomorrow one of our nephew's one of my nephew's is getting married so a lot of people came from well to Florida Virginia and Texas and Tennessee here for that for both occasions
[speaker002:] um-hum um-hum um-hum well that's kind of nice to be able to do that to for both occasions my my uh family
[speaker001:] so it's been
[speaker002:] um my father's family uh he had five or six oh I let see six brothers and sisters and uh when my grandmother died we found that we were not getting together except um just when somebody died
[speaker001:] yeah
[speaker002:] it was only funerals and so it was kind of sad so about I guess it was about two or three years ago I planed this cousins reunion and how I my my cousins even though we're all fairly close there's only two or three of them that's out of town and out of state uh I we didn't keep in close contact and there were sometimes well let's see one one family had five and one family had four children and the rest of us were you know like two and three and uh so I just sent to the oldest child in each you know uh in each family uh my oldest cousin in every family to uh to send me their brother's and sister's names and addresses and their names of their spouses and I got good pretty good response from that had to do a little phone work and then I just sent out a real neat little memo to everybody and one of the cousins helped cook the meat the meat and everybody brought a dish and uh I it just worked out really really well
[speaker001:] I I'm actually one of sixteen kids so and only nine of those kids belong to my mother
[speaker002:] oh my word um-hum
[speaker001:] and they were all here in Tennessee today the first time we have all been together for a snap shot in well forever it's been in my memory yeah
[speaker002:] well I I can imagine it's hard to get that many people together
[speaker001:] the last time we had a legitimate family reunion one of the sisters couldn't make it so
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] everybody had pictures of everybody together but her
[speaker002:] oh shoot well how often do you all do you have try to have like reunion
[speaker001:] so today we well it's kind of like your family sometimes it's just funerals and and and special occasions but the last family reunion was in eighty five and I'd like to see another one get going
[speaker002:] um-hum um-hum um-hum um-hum
[speaker001:] I was going to you know now that the subjects been brought up uh about five years ago it was actually I didn't get to attend this but I was so wanting to but several of my sisters had got together with some other people in the neighborhood we grew up in
[speaker002:] um-hum um-hum um-hum
[speaker001:] and we had a community park and of course we all rode the same buses and stuff and they had a block or like a community reunion and
[speaker002:] um-hum um-hum um-hum oh well that's that would be fun uh-huh
[speaker001:] I didn't get to attend because I was in the process of moving to Texas over that same weekend and uh but they said you know it was a blast and they sent me pictures
[speaker002:] uh-hum
[speaker001:] it was you know people we grew up with and uh people came from all over the place to get back for that one
[speaker002:] um-hum well I don't know about you but neighborhoods just aren't like that anymore and if you can you know get together with an old neighborhood like that that is really neat
[speaker001:] yeah I would love to I mean I just love to you know stories about the kids I grew up with but uh I'd like to see I'd still like to see them yeah
[speaker002:] um-hum oh sure and and to find out what happened to everybody right um-hum
[speaker001:] well at the time you know all I could do was tell them hey well Sam's moving from New Mexico to Texas and this that and so the other so
[speaker002:] um-hum well one of the fun things I did was when I sent out my invitations I mean they weren't like invitations I just did it on a on a plain sheet of typewriting paper and I took old photographs of my cousins um when they were little real little and just did kind of a collage
[speaker001:] yeah
[speaker002:] on on that you know and just just printed it on uh a real good copy machine uh you know you they weren't really good pictures but that you could tell who everybody was and it
[speaker001:] yeah um-hum
[speaker002:] and everybody got a big kick out of that because there were a lot of pictures that I had that nobody else had had
[speaker001:] hum a few years ago my wife's family and they're off in a little town in Missouri and uh
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] they planned it for several years and actually had a book made of peoples stories and where people went and photographs that went back about two hundred years and uh and of course
[speaker002:] um-hum oh that would be fun uh was that it wasn't that wasn't a genealogy book or
[speaker001:] it was no it each each family that lived in
[speaker002:] it was it was different than that