A few years ago, though it may be as many as ten, my Dad asked me to locate for him a copy of Thomas Hardy’s poem Heredity so that he could share it at the next family reunion.

This first stanza has come to emblemize why I return each year to the family reunion. My first national reunion was 1996 when we met in Charlottesville, VA. I had just entered the lobby of the hotel when a cousin I hadn’t yet met greeted me with an "I know you must be here for the Chenault reunion!"—so there it was a simple recognition of the family face. I would mention that this was all the more noteworthy because there were at least three other family reunions going on simultaneously at the hotel that year.

In 2001, the reunion in celebration of our 300^th anniversary in America went to Williamsburg where there was a great program and lots of activities for the young and young at heart. This was our largest ever reunion and a true family event as the youngster raced the oldsters for Aunt Luisa’s homemade cookies and one of the nephews asked in a tour of the Governor’s Palace, "are all these people our cousins?" This year the Chenault choir was launched and the Huguenot Hymn proved that musical talent was not the dominant trait in the Chenault line. I believe this was also the reunion where Cousin Belle announced that she was a Chenault both by marriage and by birth as she’d given birth to four Chenaults.

On July 17-20, 2009, the sixtieth Chenault Family National Association reunion will take place in Augusta, GA. As your President, I will be hard at work with the family to make this a special event for us all. This will be the first reunion where the new Red Book, hot off the presses, will be available for purchase and review (a thousand thanks to Sue Chenault, Donna and Gus Mellick, and all those who worked to make this edition possible). Please mark your calendars now and call a cousin about coming with you. I also invite and urge you to watch the website for registration information. If you have ideas and suggestions please let me know.

So why do I think that we meet each year. We do it to celebrate love of family—and that is what we are whether we are first cousins or fifth cousins once removed. We do it for the joy of being together, for fun and laughter. We do it for memory’s sake. Together we can share loving, and some times new, stories of the mother, father, and cousins that have passed on into eternity. We do it to honor our ancestors who fled to this country to escape religious persecution and those who established the families of which we are part. We do it learn—by knowing our history, our heritage, and our family, we better know ourselves.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance -- that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.

See you all in Augusta!