Seeking Old Family Sayings

Many of the Rea children went to the Providence Church School which later became the Downs School

 We have tossed around the idea of adding short little tidbits in the book about family life from years ago in the form of family sayings. If you grew up in a Rea family that came from North Carolina would you please do us the honor of sharing as many family sayings as you can remember and tell us who said them and any other details that seem important.  Of course tell us who you are as well. Just use the comments link below. For encouragement we include another fine old picture. This of the Downs School children in about 1905. Zeb Rea is on the far left, middle row. All 10 of his children are still alive and are greatly responsible for the continuation of the annual family reunions. 2010 will be the 75th annual reunion.

Map of Rea Sites

When Rod and I first attended a Rea reunion in 1995, we had never been to the Pineville- Charlotte area together.  We were fortunate in that Rod’s cousin (once removed) Betsy Blankenship was kind enough to drive us around the area to see the old remaining Rea houses and land that was once owned by the Reas.  Not everyone who comes to the reunions, or just comes to the area to see where their ancestors and family used to live, is able to have their own personal tour guide. So with this in mind, at this year’s reunion (2009), we introduced a map of Rea sites in the area, a sort of “drive-it-yourself” tour on a printed map.  We only had a few available so here is a similar map, via Google Maps:

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Click on View Larger Map to see the map larger and to see the explanation of the symbols used.

If you would like one of the printed maps, leave your request here in the comment section or send us an email at reaclanbook(at)gmail(dot)com. 

74th Rea Reunion

It wasn’t cool, but this year no one was complaining about the heat or lack of rain. Often it seems like the weather picks the Rea Reunion weekend to try out its summer muscles. Of course in the air-conditioned Fellowship Hall at the Providence Presbyterian Church no one has really suffered from the weather for many years now. The biggest concern every year is setting up all the tables and chairs needed for 100+ family and a lot of food. Willie Rea is usually in charge of that but this year he had an unusual conflict of dates and couldn’t be there. Fortunately his brothers John and Ralph were willing to step in and see that a crew was formed. Ralph also, being a former choir director, had a group of family men prepared with a song like he usually does. There seemed to be more than the usual number of children or young people in attendance, which is always nice to see, since family reunions in general seem to appeal to the older generation.

 The youngest of the family in attendance this year was little David Gutkin Huntley, baby son of George and Emilia Gutkin-Huntley, born on March 28, 2009.  He got his silver dollar as did our oldest attendee from the Coffey side of the family, Margaret Elisabeth Coffey Outen, who is 89. We have a picture.

Margaret Outen, David Huntley and his father, George Huntley

 Speaking of pictures – one of the side rooms at the Hall has in recent years been used as the display room for historical family pictures and documents, many blown up to large sizes for easy viewing. There has been a lot of progress made in the last 3 years in identifying our ancestors in these pictures many of which were taken in the 1800’s. This year we had two very special portraits displayed that were the original framed copies of the two patriarchs we have the earliest images of – that is Green Lee Rea and his son John Laney Rea. They were brought by Don Venable who attended his first Rea Reunion with his wife. He is from the Hartis side of the family. During the presentation part of the reunion after everyone had eaten, he was asked by MC and co-chairman, Margaret Harrelson, to come up and tell the story of how he became the owner of these rare originals. In another post we hope to bring you his own description of that process and how it relates to our “Mystery Picture” problem.

 Also in the presentation a book report was given by Lee Rea explaining why the Rea Family book was still not in print. Last year he really thought it would be ready and he secretly considered an escape trip to Patagonia or someplace very far away rather than to have to explain, again, why it is not ready for print. It comes down to the sense of responsibility the book committee feels about the accuracy of the information and putting it out in book form that others will then use as a a source of authority. The research and editing process is still too frequently revealing something new or unexpected that has to be correlated with the whole. No one threw eggs or tomatoes (which were available) when Lee was finished. There was, however, positive book news in the family.

 Eleanor Bass Hayes, grandaughter of Mary Rea Alexander Bass, published her memoirs this year entitled “Memoirs of Gramflakes“. It has many Rea family memories and stories that go as far back as to what life was like in the 30’s in Mecklenburg County, NC, and can be purchased on Amazon.com . After the reunion Mari and I even drove to one of the old family land holdings (now a housing development called Rea Woods) and went down to McAlpine Creek where Eleanor remembered so fondly the best swimming hole around. Mari had designed a brochure for the reunion folks with a map showing where many of the old Rea family sites can be found.

Margaret Harrelson and Eleanor Bass Hayes

 With all the growth and development that has taken place, nothing is like it used to be, but it is still interesting to see the area and what has become of what was basically farmland. Two or three exceptions, perhaps, to the changes are the church sanctuary itself, much of the cemetery and the restored John Laney Rea house which was purchased and moved to a prominent corner by the Charlottte-Mecklenburg Historical Landmarks Commission. It is now known as the Grier-Rea House and is the featured property on their website as of 6/21/09 – http://www.cmhpf.org/index.html. The commission purchases and restores historically significant properties and then sells them with certain agreements attached.

We hope you were able to come to this year’s reunion, and if you didn’t, we hope you will be able to attend next year’s, which will be the 75th year and should be something special.  At the very least, there will be food.

See what you missed if you didn't come?

Rea Reunion 2009

It’s Rea Reunion Time!

Date: Sunday, June 14, 2009

Time: 12:45pm

Place: Providence Presbyterian Church, 10140 Providence Church Lane, Charlotte, NC   28227

Bring all your family members and join your relatives for an afternoon of food and fellowship.

 

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(Click on “View Larger Map” above to see this map in a larger format and to get directions from your location)

If you have attended Rea Reunions in the past or are in contact with the Reunion co-chairs, then you know that every year they send out a form so that any changes in the family can be recorded or updated in the family database.  If you have family history to add, or have some changes to make and don’t have the form, please bring a COPY of your information to the reunion, or leave a comment here and we’ll get in touch with you. 

There will be a brief memorial given at the reunion.  If you know of the passing of one of our relatives since June 2008, please let us know (leave a comment or send us an email at reaclanbook(at)gmail(dot)com).

Read about the history of the Mecklenburg County, NC, Rea reunions here.  Not sure if you are related to these Reas or not?  At this year’s reunion we hope to have copies of the family database available for viewing and for purchase.  Or, contact us (leave a comment or send an email) and we’ll try to see if you are a leaf on our tree or not.

The History of the Rea Reunions

History was made in the year 1935, but not many folks could tell you what happened that year in America that has had such a lasting effect on its citizens.  The stock market crashed 6 years earlier and we were more or less in the depths of the Great Depression. It would be 4 more years before World War II began in Europe with Germany’s invasion of Poland; so what was so important about 1935 that we should remember?

 The most lasting legacy of our president Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was the establishment of Social Security – in 1935.  And for the Rea family in North Carolina, perhaps the most lasting legacy was the establishment of the annual family reunions – in 1935.  After almost 75 years meeting in the same place at Providence Presbyterian Church in Mecklenburg County, NC, the reunions still draw between 100 and 150 relatives and there is still too much food.

 The Rea family gave the land for that church which was established in 1767 and generations later many family members still attend and consider it their home church. That seems like a good reason to have the reunions there, though much of the family has spread out and attend other churches. The present sanctuary of Providence Church has changed little since it was erected in 1858. The balconies for the slaves are still there as are the incredibly tall windows that allowed air to circulate top and bottom during those hot summer months.

 Two cousins got together and organized that first big reunion, inviting all branches of the family. There were many surnames and many branches by that time and those first two leaders were Neil Alexander and Frank Abernethy. Their mothers were Reas. W. Reid Rea was soon appointed as secretary/treasurer with Neil Alexander as President for that first year. In later years, Neil’s brother Sam would become a president.

 We might wonder at the motivation for an Alexander and an Abernethy to initiate annual reunions for the Rea family. For example, Franklin Abernethy’s father, John Wesley Abernethy, was a prominent Methodist minister-not a Presbyterian as were most of the Scots-Irish Reas. Perhaps it was because his mother, Martha Ann, far outlived all the Rea daughters of Green Lee Rea and was a great influence on the family. But we have learned through a grand nephew, Bruce Abernethy, a family bible shows that when Franklin’s father married Martha Ann Rea, the wedding took place in a Rea home and virtually all the guests were Reas. The Abernethy side was completely absent. One could surmise that there might have been a split with his family or they were at a great distance.

 We have much more information to work with when it comes to Neily Ormond Alexander.

 Neil, although he went off to college at North Carolina State in Raleigh as a young man, it could be said, never left home. He lost his father there in a freak accident. He lost his oldest brother in a freak train accident out West. His grandfather, William Almarine Alexander, died young and he never knew him. He lost his mother for awhile, when she remarried, but she came back. Then the house burned down and they lost a good part of their history in the fire. That must have been the last straw for Neil. One could fairly draw the conclusion that he wanted to do whatever he could to bring together the family in a consistent way and thus preserve the history and ties that in his experience had been a very fragile thing indeed.

 Prior to the reunions the core Rea family had not infrequently gotten together for special occasions. Just the year before, in 1934, Neil’s Uncle, HGL Rea and his wife Isabella celebrated their 60^th Wedding Anniversary. All but one of their 11 living children had come from as far as from the state of Washington. So there was a strong sense of family on the Rea side. When the first annual Rea Reunion took place the following year, HGL and Belle were celebrated as the oldest Rea’s present. Every year since, the oldest, the youngest and whoever has traveled the greatest distance have been honored.

1936 reunion picture taken in front of Providence Presbyterian Church

 At the second reunion in 1936, our secretary/treasurer, Reid Rea, reported that $12 was collected from about 100 relatives present the year before and the expenses had been $5 which left $7 to apply to the current year’s expenses. The presidency was passed on to Dr. Green Lee Rea who was the superintendent of the Charlotte Health Dept. for many years and carried his father’s name. This isn’t easy to explain, but he was much younger than HGL Rea but was HGL’s uncle. In jest, he was called the grand, old uncle. Frank Abernethy was chosen vice president with Reid continuing for several years as secretary-treasurer of the reunions. Mrs. J.L.(Eunice) Rankin was chosen historian. Our data shows that she died in the fall of 1937 and in 1938 the program shows that Miss Janie Matthews and Mrs. Ralph R(h)one gave the history report. But after that and for years hence HGL’s son, Dr. Calvin Rea, was known as the family historian. He was a veterinarian as was Dr. Samuel Alexander who filled the role of president a few times. Calvin put together the first book of family history in 1952.

 Looking back over the documents we have about the first few formal reunions, which are far from complete, one notices what seems like an odd choice from our current perspective. The reunions were held not on Sunday or even Saturdays, but Thursdays. How could you ask relatives to come from miles around to attend a reunion on a weekday? In answer, we first have to remember that in the 1930’s most of our family members were still farmers, not people with jobs in towns. For a Scots-Irish Presbyterian farmer, Saturdays and Sundays were spoken for. Saturday was market & supplies day and Sunday was for church. The weekdays were much more flexible.

 However, by 1940, the reunions started shifting to Saturday. More folks were working in mills and factories by then and it was hard for them to get off during the week. Eventually the reunions were held on Sunday after the church service. Roads were better, travel was faster.

 After the war and into the 50’s, group pictures were often taken at the reunions, but the participants were not necessarily identified on the prints. In the last couple of years those early pictures have been displayed at the reunions in the hopes that the older generation can identify most of those faces of 60 and 70 years ago before it is too late. Some of the older folk squinting at those tiny faces on the prints are looking at themselves as children and trying to recapture how they felt then and what they thought of such a big group of folks and being told “This is your family”.

 Please leave a comment here or send an email to reaclanbook(at)gmail(dot)com

This post written by Rod Mann.

The Picture Mystery

We have talked about the problem of getting the data correct or corrected with our ancestors in the family tree.  The surest way of checking on the correctness of a record is to go to original documents like census records or the will of the person in question, which is not necessarily an easy thing to do.  But in the case of family pictures there may not be any written record anywhere that reveals the identities or date taken of the image you see in front of you.  If it is a group picture you may recognize two or three faces from other pictures that have better notation or childhood memories or word of mouth verification from relatives.  One of the earliest Rea Family pictures we have of what might be called a patriarch, Green Lee Rea, has come under question because of a more recent discovery. 

 

For years an image has circulated in the family and been shown at reunions of a clean-shaven Green Lee Rea who looks slightly cross-eyed and with sagging neck, quite advanced in years (above).  Lee Rea says he can remember this picture hanging in the house of HGL and Belle Rea who were his grandparents.  In our search for pictures to use in the book which has been engineered by Betsy Blankenship, she came up with a much less known photograph of Green Lee marked on the back as he and his second wife Adaline taken in 1874 (below).  Our records say that there was 40 years difference in their age and the picture seems to bear that out.  Another point of verification is that the clothing worn seems to correspond with fashion of the 1870’s period.  So everything seems to verify the notes on the back of the picture.

 

The problem is that the man in the latter picture looks nothing like the Green Lee Rea in the picture that has been accepted as the standard for maybe half a century.  The first impulse is to reject the newer picture as a mistake of some kind.  But when you examine the older picture you can see that it has been heavily doctored by an artist or retoucher in the process of making a copy from what was probably an original photograph.  In those days the only way to get a copy of an older photograph was to have it copied by an artist.  The photographer might have been itinerate or out of business and there would be no way to get a copy from him.

 

 

This is a close-up cropped out of the above marriage portrait for easier comparison to the clean-shaven touched-up or doctored image.

Between the obvious retouching and the possibility of, say, a ten year span between pictures, it is quite possible that both pictures are truly of Green, one hirsute and the other not.  If any one of you visiting this blog have any insights on this mystery of the two Green Lee Rea’s, please let us know by leaving a comment or sending an email to Reaclanbook (at) gmail (dot) com.

Welcome, Rea Clan members and families!

 

Please read our About page first, if you haven’t already, to learn about the story of the Rea Clan family history book.  It’s been a long journey, and some have probably wondered if there is any end in sight.  We hope, through the medium of this blog, to provide those interested with information on the progress of the book, as well as some insight on the book’s beginnings, its authors and compilers, and on its contents. 

Creating a book of this type (maybe of any type) is a challenging experience.  Part of the challenge of this particular book has been that it was begun with no clear vision of it’s future- but what it did have was a fairly clear and relatively detailed picture of it’s past.  Previous family members had painstakingly compiled what they knew of the family’s history and its people- the earliest known ancestors and their descendants- and had written down and passed on what they learned.  

The present committee members took this research and built on it, adding research of their own and utilizing the emerging power of the computer and the Internet to expand their knowledge and facilitate their record-keeping.  Sometimes, this created problems that were unforeseen, like the learning curve required when the archivists in the family began to enter all the hand-written information into the Family Tree Maker program, and glitches that popped up through its use.  Increased access to data like past census forms, military records and birth and death rolls, through sites like Ancestry.com, revealed inaccuracies in the family’s records.  All of these problems took time to be addressed, and are still being resolved as of this time.

As the book began to take shape, it became clear that it would be best presented in two main sections- the first section to contain biographies of the earliest ancestors on down through chosen lines, along with pieces written by the committee that will illuminate the time periods and the lives of these people.  The second section will consist of the Family Tree Maker data that has been compiled over the years, edited to reflect the lines of the Mecklenburg Reas; primarily those that stayed in the area or in contact with the Mecklenburg Reas.  This data (for those of you familiar with this software) will be in two software-generated reports called the Outline Descendant Report and the Genealogy Report, along with an index that will pertain only to the Family Tree Maker data.

Much of the genealogical data has come from Rea family members who have filled out and returned the update sheets that are sent out at the time of the yearly reunions.  At this time, the family database contains nearly 4600 individuals, and more continue to be added.  Because this is a history which will by necessity have a cut-off point in the Rea family timeline, all of this data won’t be included in the book.  It will, however, continue to be gathered, entered and saved in the database maintained by the family.  Like this database, we hope that the book and this blog will be enhanced by contributions, comments and suggestions made by you, the members, families and friends of the Rea Clan. 

We also hope that you will frequently visit this blog and leave your comments, suggestions and any contributions to the family lore that you may have.  You can also request to be placed on a list to be notified when the book will be available, either by leaving a comment here or by sending an email to reaclanbook (at) gmail . com.

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