How the World Has and Hasn’t Changed Since My Family’s Reunion Started Almost 100 Years Ago

For the first time in 97 years, my family did not gather in Central Illinois this past August for the Gray Reunion. It just didn’t seem safe to bring 25 people together in Weldon Park during a pandemic to socialize and share food.

As the Secretary-Treasurer of The Gray, it was my job to confirm the date and time with the President and send out the invites. So I started polling family members in early July.

“No way!” My cousin Nancy wrote in an email. “We have too many old people. I’m an old person. We don’t want to die!”

Nobody else I asked reacted quite like that, but there was no support for an in-person gathering. Yet it seemed to me that we shouldn’t let the reunion lapse, especially since we are so close to celebrating 100 straight years.

So we did a Zoom Gray Reunion instead, recording and posting it on YouTube afterwards.

I’m sure that my great-grandparents Emmett and Alice Gray, who founded the reunion in 1923, would never have dreamed of such a thing.

And yet there are so many parallels to their world back then and ours today. The old French proverb, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” is really true in this case. These three things were just as life-changing back then as they are today.

1. Health Crisis

The Gray Reunion was founded only three years after the Spanish Flu pandemic had ended in 1920. About 675,000 people in the U.S. had lost their lives during its two-year course, with 25,000 deaths in Illinois. Right now, approximately 397,000 in the U.S. and 22,000 in Illinois have died from Covid-19 in the past year.

During the Spanish Flu pandemic, schools, theaters, and places of worship were closed. Public transportation was limited and mass gatherings banned. In September 1918, the Red Cross recommended wearing face masks, but like today, many resisted this. The most vocal was a group called the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco whose members questioned the scientific data and felt that their civil liberties were being violated.

Similar to now, some also felt back then that the U.S. government was lying about the severity of the flu pandemic because it didn’t want to disrupt the war effort in Europe.

2. Women’s Rights

Women were also finding their political voice when The Gray was founded, earning the right to vote in 1920. However it would be years until the number of eligible women voters would equal that of the men. In 2020, the American people elected Kamala Harris as the first woman to hold the office of vice president since elections began 242 years earlier. In contrast, it only took 30 years for the first woman to be elected assistant vice president of the Gray Reunion and 50 years for a woman to be elected president.

I’m sure it probably never occurred to Emmett and his sons in the early days of the reunion to elect a woman president. And the women of the Gray were not about to challenge their men. They had their hands full preparing the food for the reunion, getting everyone ready to go, and keeping an eye on the children once they were there. Little did those men know that their women could have done all that and also run the business meeting too.

3. Democracy in Action

Like our country, The Gray is governed in a democratic fashion with elected officers. Those officers are in charge of organizing the reunion and running a meeting to discuss the business of the reunion – like where next year’s reunion will be held, electing officers, and forming committees to do tasks. People nowadays typically serve one- or two-year terms as president and secretary-treasurer.

In the past, reunion members also elected vice presidents and assistant vice presidents, which I assume was done to make people feel important and included. Today, very few Gray family descendants want to the job, so it’s always the same three or four people who agree to serve and get elected.

Unlike the U.S. presidency, there are no term limits. But rarely has anyone served more than two consecutive terms. There’s always a peaceful transfer of power with a welcoming nod to the incoming president and the box that contains all the minutes and records passed along to the new secretary-treasurer.

The number of people attending the reunion has dwindled in recent years. And none of Emmett and Alice’s five children or their spouses are still alive. But they would be proud that we have kept the reunion going – even during a pandemic. Because family traditions matter.

Editor’s Note

This post first appeared in Sara Marberry’s blog, The View from Here.