by Donna Swagerty Shreve
My family has always been good about getting together for special occasions. As a child, the huge Swagerty family gathered every Thanksgiving at the grandparents’ dairy farm and celebrated our family and caught up on the previous year’s events. After Grandma Swagerty died, one of my father’s brothers decided we needed a twice-yearly reunion and he hosted father’s day
Grandma and then Grandpa had died and the Thanksgivings continued and various brothers took turns hosting the events. Slowly the family grew and became so huge that the remaining brothers let the separate families have their own Thanksgivings. In 1989 we tried one Thanksgiving to get the family together and 82 relatives gathered in a huge room at Ross Moor. I remember helping my mother bake 18 pies. This time the next generation of girl cousins took on the roles of organizing and cooking. It had been potluck and fortunately I filmed a good portion of the activities to share with an uncle who could not attend.
It is now ten years later and several of the first cousins and second cousins felt a need to gather once more. Great Aunt Lucy was about ready to celebrate her 96th birthday in the year 1999. I contacted some Aldriches who still lived in Hughson where it all began for the Aldrich and Swagerty families getting together. Two Aldrich sisters had married two Swagerty brothers. Everett Aldrich was my father’s first cousin. They shared Ida and Abe Aldrich as grandparents. Lucy was an Aldrich and the youngest sister of my grandmother Pearl. Lucy was enjoyed by the Swagertys and Aldriches alike. So the plan was to celebrate Lucy’s birthday in the Hughson Methodist Church, where previous reunions had been held and was the church of any Aldrich or Swagerty still in Hughson.
Now the hard part was to get the word out to all relatives. I contacted another of my father’s cousins on the Swagerty side. Jack Hunter’s mother had been my grandfather’s sister. Jack got the word out to any people coming down from the Swagerty side. Any relatives contacted were to keep passing the word to any other relative they were aware of. Meanwhile I wanted to organize how we were all related. I made family trees coming down from the first Swagertys in Hughson, Sampson and Emma Swagerty and Ida and Abe Aldrich. There had been nine surviving children from the Swagertys and five surviving children from the Aldriches. Both families had lost two infants. The trees got interesting when a Swagerty and an Aldrich got together. I organized the Swagertys on one side of the room and the Aldriches around the other side.
My sister duplicated my family charts onto huge strips of butcher paper with her skilled calligraphy. As each relative came in they were given a name tag and a color dot. Cousin Nancy kept track of all incoming guests and marked off her family tree. I then used a ladder to mark each member on the family tree. If you were not sure who a certain person was or how they were related, you could check the charts. The different colors designated various generations. This system came in very handy. In many cases I had the person put the dot by their name if their name was low enough. I was also able to add new members that I was not aware of.
The room was filling up and the table was full of delicious home cooked items. Every one seemed to know that store bought food would not be appropriate for this crowd. Lucy was holding court and loving being queen for the day. A side room had several long tables full of family albums and pictures from previous reunions. Not knowing exactly who would attend, we were convinced we were about ready to sit down to our glorious potluck.
In the door an older man wheeled in an older woman. My Uncle Clem happened to be standing near the entry table. The man stood there and said hello to Clem, as he obviously knew him. Clem immediately bluffed his greeting to this unknown man of similar vintage. Clem’s wife turned to me and said Clem did not know whom that was. I turned quickly to the family tree charts as this man was keeping everyone around him in suspense, as he would not fill out his name tag just yet.
I knew I had never met this man but I had heard family stories. Somehow my brain clicked and I stabbed at a guess. Are you Junior? Jr. Repass stared at me in amazement, as he had no idea who I was. I had guessed correctly. Clem quickly recovered and joined in greeting him and his sister who was in the wheel chair. Junior had been shunned from ever visiting his sister as her husband was quite a homophobe. When the sister’s husband died, Junior returned to Hughson to take care of her. He had been living in Berkeley and had retired after a successful career as a landscape architect.
After posting all of the colored dots I made sure to take pictures. After our late lunch, each family group was asked to gather outside for a family picture. There were 85 relatives that joined together that day. Lucy was given a microphone and she knew how to work the spotlight. Each family was asked to have a senior member introduce their family. Requests were made for copies of various pictures displayed in the side room. Families caught up on a joyous occasion instead of waiting for a funeral to get together. We decided Lucy should have a birthday celebration each remaining year of her life. She lived to celebrate her 101st birthday. The rest of her birthdays were held in Foster City where she lived. Many relatives made that trek but the crowd was never the one that had gathered in Hughson. There was a large group shot of a birthday party held in the same room in 1982 to celebrate one of Lucy’s sisters Lulu, who still lived in Hughson at that time. It was fascinating to see all of the changes in the people who had been in both pictures.
Everett Aldrich died just this last year of 2016 and the service was held in Hughson at the same church and the reception in that same social hall. Unfortunately, due to distance and deaths, I was the only one from the 1999 reunion, besides immediate relatives of Everet, that attended. It is sad for me to see the family so scattered and no longer finding excuses to get together. Each generation sets its own traditions and the gatherings of my youth are certainly a thing of the past.
Swagerty-Aldrich Family Web Site 