On August 20th through 21st the Gardner family will celebrate their 77th annual family reunion in Springfield, Tennessee. The Gardners have held a reunion on the same date each year since 1935. The Gardner family is one of the largest African American families in Robertson County, Tennessee. I am currently working on a family tree for the reunion which includes nearly 800 direct descendants from Aaron and Betty Gardner. Aaron and Betty along with their three sons, Daniel, George and Jackson were enslaved on the Wessyngton Plantation from 1839 to 1865. The reunion will include a tour of the Wessyngton Plantation.
Archive for July, 2011
Gardner Family to Celebrate 77th Annual Family Reunion
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011Terry Family to Celebrate Family Reunion
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011On August 13th the Terry family will celebrate their bi-annual family reunion in Springfield, Tennessee. The reunion festivities will include a tour of Wessyngton Plantation. Hundreds of descendants across the country will attend the reunion. The Terry family is one of the largest families from Wessyngton with over 1,000 descendants, spanning eleven generations from their first ancestors, Dick Terry and Aggie Washington Terry.
30 Year Old Photo Foretells Subtitle of The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
John Baker and Friends at Greater South Baptist Church, 1981
Recently while going through some old photographs, I ran across this one taken with childhood friends Wanda Gardner, Drextel Bowling, Teresa Gardner, Charles Gardner and Kim Bradley. The photo was taken in 1981 at Greater South Baptist Church during a Black history lesson. I was quite surprised when I noticed the blackboard behind me had part of the subtitle to my book Journey to Freedom in the background nearly thirty years before the book was published. My publishers at Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster selected the subtitle for The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation.