Cousins and Kinfolks
Last week I drove my mother to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (so beautiful) to attend a family reunion for my father's family. It's a huge family and the turnout was good although not really representative of the numbers. My great grandfather Isaac Newton Graham moved from Pendleton , WVA (at the time it wouldn't have been WVA, but we figure he was typical Scots Irish coming down from PA) into that valley and scarfed up quite a bit of land and set about to have a family of six surviving children (Edward, Abraham, Isaac H., Jacob, Bessie, and John Arthur, among others who apparently didn't live too long). Each of them had huge families, and so on. My father had eleven siblings, for instance, and one of them had eight children. So West Augusta county is lousy with Grahams and their kin. We had gone seven years ago to the annual reunion. I really should go more frequently, but it is a long trip for me. My brother came down from Maryland, so that was a special p...