Why Have a Family Reunion?

Why have a family reunion?
Roots
The past is past--why dredge up old memories and old relationships? Why is our connection to the past so important to us? In the seventies, when Alex Haley's book Roots became a best seller, it seemed to spawn a heightened interest on a public level in family history. The book seemed to awaken in many people their instinctive desire to know about their ancestors. Mr. Haley wrote,

"In all of us is a hunger marrow deep to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning no matter what our attainments in life. There is a vacuum, an emptiness, and a most disquieting loneliness."

In 1977, Alex Haley's book was made into a TV program. The message of the book and the program motivated many people who were adopted as children to seek out information about their birth families. Many of them went to extraordinary lengths to search records at orphanages, hospitals, and county court houses to see if the mystery of their heritage could be unraveled. But long before the upsurge of interest on a national level, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had been searching and keeping records of deceased persons, so much so that they are now in a position--as individuals and as a church--to help thousands of people trace their ancestry. In the past, the Church called this work by its scientific name, genealogy." In recent years the Church has replaced that term with "family history," which is more "user-friendly," and much more descriptive of what it's really all about. Soaring on the wings of the electronic revolution, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now provides extensive facilities and multitudinous records to millions of people both in and out of the Church, giving them a place to go to start educating themselves with this most precious information--their family history. A family reunion is a great place to find or share information about your common roots.

Getting to Know You
While searching records for deceased ancestors can be an incredible adventure, there is another marvelous dimension added to your sense of family when you personally know some of your living relatives--as many of your progenitors as possible and your aunts, uncles, and cousins as well. President Spencer W. Kimball taught, "It is important for us . . . to cultivate in our own family a sense that we belong together eternally. . . . We ought to encourage our children to know their relatives. We need to talk of them, make effort to correspond with them, visit them, join family organizations, etc." (Ensign, November 1974, p. 112). The fact that some families don't feel they have much in common with the rest of the clan or sometimes even hold grudges against them is another good reason to get together. I have read many wonderful accounts of how family reunions have helped to heal old wounds and bring new love, understanding, and appreciation among family members who may have been alienated for years. But even without such high expectations, a wonderful family reunion cannot hurt. I just want to motivate you to have one, and give you a few suggestions on how to do it.

While it is true that the family reunion can be a good opportunity to exchange formal genealogical information, if the family reunion is a new experience to your family, you may want to play down this aspect to begin with and make having fun and getting acquainted or re-acquainted the main focus of the first reunion. An excitement about and interest in the past will evolve naturally from the sense of family that is generated by just getting together.

Families Are Forever
I love the short passage by Eileen Kump quoted below that captures the feeling of a close family carrying on from generation to generation. This particular occasion was a funeral, but the sense is the same for any meaningful family gathering. A grandmother is watching her young grandsons as they parade past their grandfather's casket. She says,

"Those sacred, half-grown, unknown quantities, not quite spitting images of their dads or any other human creature, not happy about their granddad dying but not unhappy either. There they stood and the way of their standing, awkward as it was, sent praise to heaven, praise for the dead man whose blood flowed in their veins and whose stature added height to theirs."

Then she speaks as if to her dead husband:

"The blood was there so of course the tribute to you was there, but Sweetheart, that day I saw glory! I saw an eternity of sons!" (Eileen Kump, Bread & Milk and Other Stories as quoted in Thomas F. Rogers, "The Sacred in Literature," Literature and Belief, vol. 1, 1981, p 65.)

An eternity of sons and daughters! Family reunion is an eternal concept in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the blessings of being together forever are based on what we do here and now. One of the greatest aspirations of the family reunion is to cement that sacred sense of eternal family, which seems so lost to the fractured world.

Bring Them to Christ
In effect, bringing children to a sense of their eternal family is bringing them to the family of Christ. It can not only lead them to the Savior on a spiritual level, but hopefully, a strong tie to their family will actually help bring young people to Christ in down-to-earth, practical ways. They can learn that others care about their place in the big picture, and they can begin to realize that their daily choices will eternally affect the lives of many other people. They may be influenced to go on missions and marry in the temple partly because their cousins are doing those things and their uncles and aunts have done them. Such positive peer pressure may not be the highest motive for doing righteous things, but it can help put them in a position where better motives can develop. I have known several families who make a great effort to foster close ties among the cousins. These extended families are strongly committed to follow the prophet, remain morally clean, and serve the Lord. They derive great power from each other in keeping their high standards day to day and in seeking for eternal values, attainments, and goals. One family calls this potent phenomenon "cousin power."

While the family reunion should be lots of fun, it can and should serve a higher purpose. Because it can promote righteousness and help lead our families to Christ, it is surely worth our very best efforts.