Family Reunion

     My father's generation of the French-Canadian Cloutier clan consisted of eight (!) siblings. They grew up during WWI and the Great Depression on a subsistence farm in north-central Massachusetts with a widowed mother. My grandfather was killed in a gravel pit accident. Seventy descendants of those eight gathered Sunday at the Royalston Fish and Game Club, only a 3-4 miles from the old Cloutier farm, to re-connect and reminisce.

     There were the usual and unusual  pot luck dishes and great collections of pictures up to a century old. The genealogical chart was fifteen (!) feet long. See it in the picture below. Thanks, Bonnie.

     Expenses are covered by auctioning off donated items. Son, Mark, was Shanghaied into being the auctioneer.

     It takes a lot of work by a hard core of volunteers and a lot of individual travel to make it happen, but it is an invaluable experience.