After moving to California from New York as a child and then ending up in the New Orleans, La. I got hooked into genealogy with notes on our family left by Rosalind Daniels. Rosalind was way ahead of her time. She left names and dates for each branch of the family. As a child every year for out two weeks vacation we would go to Stafford and stay on my Grandparents Edith Harper & Merrill Call's farm. In 2000 I met online my third cousin Patty Hankins who lives in Bethesda, Md. After many months of talking about research and family information, we came up with the ideal of having a family reunion. We picked the year 2003 which meant it was the 150th anniversay of our GGGrandfather Robert Call coming to America. His future wife Charlotte Joslin came in 1854 and were married that same year. Of course we wanted the reuion in New York, and never gave it any thought that it might be hard to pull off with both of us living out of state. So we plunged into the reuion. We started in trying to track folks down. We spent about a year doing this, and in doing this without first setting a date we had a whole branch of the family thinking that the reuion was not going to happen. In fact they picked the same date for there own reunion at the beach in another state. This cost us not having that fifty four people at our reunion. Now we finally had our date set and a shelter at a state park reserved With so many people coming from out of state we could not have the normal pass around dish type of food. My cousins wife Sandy Call who lives in Rochester did all the leg work and got us a great caterer. I did the reunion tee shirts here in New Orleans and hauled them to New York. We told everyone coming to the reunion to please bring any old family pictures with them. Pattys husband Bill Lawrence brought a scanner and laptop with him. He scanned all the pictures and gave them right back to who brought them. Patty and Bill have a web site and allready have the pictures taken at the reuion on it. In the furture they plan to have on all the old pictures also posted. The site is http://Freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~Plhankins/Calljoslinhome.htm Our reunion was written up in the Batavia paper, The Daily News July 7, 2003 I am going to send the write up in a seperate posting (I am proud of it) The point of this story is: I had all the facts and information on paper, but I had no personal connection to most of the family. And I wanted to meet and talk to them in person. Every one of the seventy two persons who came were so happy we did the reunion. Hopefully we will have more reuions in the future. Please drop me a line if you have any questions Sharon Sharonkessler@cs.com