A family reunion is the perfect setting for relatives to naturally share family history stories. Reminiscing about the “good old days” brings laughter, sparks meaningful conversations, and helps everyone feel more connected to the family roots.
These family gatherings offer a powerful opportunity – not only to reconnect with each other, but also to rediscover the history, experiences, and stories that shaped your family. By collecting and preserving family history stories, you can create a lasting resource, something future generations can cherish for years to come.
For your next Family Reunion, consider setting up a Memorial Group with Reunacy, where stories, photos, and keepsakes come together to honor your family legacy.
Honoring Your Loved Ones at Your Family Reunion
In a recent case study, the Jenkins family created a Memorial Group with Reunacy for their 2025 summer reunion. With a computer set up inside the reunion venue, while the main reunion events took place in the backyard, the Memorial Group served as a place where family members could browse through photos and profiles of family members who had passed.
The Memorial Group was one of the highlights of the Jenkins Family Reunion! In addition, the Memorial Group enlightened each family member with new stories and information about their ancestors from obituaries and family stories, connecting the past to the present.
We interviewed the Jenkins family history expert, Cindy, to learn more about how she created her family’s Memorial Group, her experience using Reunacy, and how her passion for family history work has become a central part of her life.
How to Start Family History Work
The first thing you need to get started with family history work is passion and curiosity! A lot of family history work involves collecting information, and organizing it all into the right place. While we might never know everything about our ancestors, we can learn a few things!
“Family history work is important to me because family is important to me. My family heritage has made me who I am.” – Cindy
Cindy was inspired to start her family history work to honor the family that she came from.
How did your 2025 Family Reunion spark your family history goals?
Cindy: I originally created a family history book called “Legacy of Love” in 2007 for my parents, which was a compilation of family stories and pictures from their upbringings with input from each of them and their surviving siblings. It resulted in an extremely detailed history of their lives. I gave a copy of the book to my parents, their siblings, and my siblings. Ever since then, I’ve been very anxious to build on that work and share the stories with more family members.
When our family started to plan our 2025 family reunion, it was a perfect time to revisit this family history work, and make plans to share the stories with new generations!
A DIY Journey into Collecting Family History Stories
How did you collect stories for your Family Reunion Memorial Group?
Cindy: I’m not really an Ancestry.com person (nothing against it), but everything I’ve ever found in my family history work has been on my own. Many family history stories were just passed down to me.
When we decided to create a Family Memorial Group to feature at our family reunion, the very first thing I did was call my sister. Word got around, and a relative reached out to me and said, “You need to come to my house—I pretty much have an obituary for everyone in the family.”
So I went over, and she wasn’t exaggerating. She had tons of obituaries for immediate and extended family members dating back to the early 1900s – all placed inside a manila envelope that she’d kept for decades. In addition to that, I found obituaries and articles tucked inside the massive coffee-table Bible that my Aunt Lucille had given me before she died. It also included a mimeographed printout that gave a brief family history dating back to the Revolutionary War. I’m not sure where she got it, but it was amazing!
Reunacy Team: That coffee-table Bible sounds like a treasure trove of information! It’s amazing how family history work can take you on a journey of discovery, and surprise you along the way.
Cindy: I also found a box in my attic filled with obituaries, newspaper articles, and other family memorabilia that my mom had saved over the years. Each obituary had the basic information like birth dates, death dates, and family members. This collection of obituaries, combined with the information I had collected while creating my family book in 2007, yielded a great start of our process. My sister Linda and I did all this work together and built out our Memorial Group in Reunacy.
Using Reunacy to Create a Family Memorial Group
How did you create in-depth profiles for your family members in your Family Reunion Memorial Group?
Cindy: All these new obituaries were a great starting point. However, Linda and I wanted to go deeper and really capture who these people were. Some of the relatives we knew very well, so writing those memorials came easily. For others, we had to do a little more research. We wanted to expand beyond each obituary and paint a fuller picture of each person’s life.
To build out full profiles in our Reunacy Memorial Group and write detailed descriptions for each person, we started by referencing the family book I put together back in 2007 because it was full of details, memories, and family history.
We also started calling many different family members to fill in the gaps. For those we didn’t know personally, we reached out to their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. People were incredibly generous—many sent us photos, shared stories, and gave us specific details, like where someone went to high school, where they taught, what sports they played, or what challenges they faced.
Honestly, a lot of the work came down to just calling and talking to people. There was a lot of texting, too, and I sent a few emails. Everyone was really gracious and willing to help.
Describe the process of uploading photos and family history information to Reunacy, as well as creating profiles?
Cindy: My sister and I actually found the process to be much easier than we expected, especially since we are older (I just turned 65, and she will be 76 later this year). We were blown away with how quickly we could copy, paste, rearrange, and edit information, and also insert the photos. Because of the ease with which we could navigate Reunacy’s intuitive software, by the time we’d finished creating one memorial, we were looking forward to starting the next one.
In order for us both to be able to edit or insert information, we started by creating a shared google document where we inserted all the obituaries and information. We did a lot of editing in there to make each bio perfect. The great part was that once we got each bio completed, we could just copy and paste the content from that google document directly into Reunacy. Adding headlines and organizing everything was super easy.
I have had some experience with layout and publishing – as the assistant editor of a Florida magazine in the 1980s and then as a high school yearbook teacher from 2008 to 2017. But, even so, technology has changed everything to the point that I find it intimidating. However, I was really impressed by how easy Reunacy made everything. It was incredible and exciting.
Viewing the Memorial Group at the Family Reunion
What was it like to see the final result and view your Jenkins Family Memorial Group at the reunion?
Cindy: When everything was uploaded and we could see all our family members in one place, it was very emotional. It was so much more than just a collection of obituaries; it was a glimpse into the lives of those who’d gone on before us. They were momentarily brought back to life in a powerful way. Their laughter. Their athleticism. Their quirks. Their heroism. Their sorrows. Their kindness. Their talents. The World War II Purple Heart recipient. The parents of 16 children. The barber. The seamstress.
How did your family engage with the Memorial Station at your Family Reunion?
Cindy: Our Memorial Group ended up being a very meaningful focal point of the reunion. I’ve always believed if you’re going to get a big group of family together, it’s important to acknowledge the ones that we’ve lost. They’re the reason we are all here.
Throughout our whole reunion, there were always people going in and out of the house to look through our Memorial Group. And I mean constantly! There was always someone in front of the Memorial screen looking through the profiles, and I would hear comments like, “I didn’t know he did that!” or “Wow, I sort of look like her!” I also saw some who were emotional reading through the tributes with each swipe of the screen.
Our family members were truly reading the mini-biographies, and learning new things about their relatives and ancestors. It was wonderful to get so much feedback, interest, and response from everyone in the family about our family history work.
The Memorial Group became more than just a tribute—it sparked connection, learning, and appreciation across generations. I believe for some, the Memorial Group gave them a true sense of belonging that they’d never felt before.
Bringing Family History to Life for the Next Generation
Cindy: One thing I found really gratifying about the whole process was the steady stream of people who kept going in to engage with our Memorial Group. Beforehand, I had anticipated the older generation to be the ones most interested. However, there was a genuine sense of participation across all ages, but especially so from the younger generations. Reunacy’s Memorial Group felt accessible and engaging from a younger person’s perspective—interactive, even. I thought that was really cool. It brought the history to life in a way that felt meaningful and approachable for everyone.
You ended up creating 33 profiles in your Memorial Group – how did you get to that point?
Cindy: Honestly, at the beginning, we thought we’d probably just create profiles for Grandmother and Granddaddy, and maybe Mom and Dad since we obviously knew them well. We figured that would be it, at least for now.
But once we started using Reunacy and saw how easy the software was to work with, everything changed. After doing the first one, we were like, “Oh my goodness, this is amazing! We’ve got this! Let’s do another one… and another one.” Before we knew it, we had completed 33 in time for the reunion! For two people who are not tech savvy, Reunacy’s intuitive and user-friendly software is the only reason we were able to accomplish that.
A Living Document for Your Family Stories
What are your future plans for the Memorial Group beyond your Family Reunion?
Cindy: What’s incredible to me about the Reunacy Memorial Group is that, even though the profiles are technically Memorials—they really feel like living documents. And what I mean by that is, they’re not static. You can keep building on them, adding stories and memories. I love that.
My cousin told me on the day of the reunion, “Oh, I have some things I want to share with you about so-and-so,” and I just said, “Send me the info, and I’ll add it.” That’s what I love about it. It’s easy. If it was hard to update or navigate, I probably wouldn’t be as enthusiastic, but it’s so intuitive. You want to add a story? Great. Want to swap out a photo? No problem! It takes two seconds!
Honestly, it’s just not daunting at all. If someone wants a picture changed, or if I find new information about someone we missed, I can just pop it in. That flexibility is incredible.
Surprise Family History Stories: Music and Beyond!
Did you have any favorite family stories you discovered while doing all this work?
Cindy: Oh, absolutely. There were so many little gems, but there was one that really stood out. I found out that my grandmother had three songs published! We always knew she liked to write, but most of us had no idea she was published.
Two nights before the reunion, I remembered a box in the attic containing family mementos. I went digging into the box, just in case I wanted to bring something to the family reunion, and inside I found the actual sheet music for one of her songs. I’m assuming it was inside a compartment of the antique organ that my grandmother left for my mother that now sits in my home.
It was signed “Mrs. J.W. Jenkins” as the writer, and now her sheet music is literally sitting on her organ in her granddaughter’s home. The song is called “My Bossy Man,” and it’s hilarious. My Aunt Margaret said, “Mother must have written that on a day when she was particularly frustrated!” And keep in mind, this is a woman who raised 16 children during the Depression and still had a song published!!!
Any other exciting discoveries during your family history journey?
Cindy: Yes, there were other nuggets too, like the family cemetery. That property is actually from a Revolutionary War land grant, so the history runs very deep.
We even have a Civil War drum still intact in our family! It belonged to an ancestor who played the drum in the Confederate army while his brother played the fife. They were both young, one was just 18. During the war, the younger brother contracted measles, which was often a death sentence back then. He was quarantined, and the older brother wanted to take care of him.
His superiors warned him, saying, “If you do that, you’re going to get sick, too,” but he did it anyway. He took care of his brother, and they both ended up dying from measles. It’s heartbreaking, but beautiful, too.
When you can tie your family to actual history like that – music, war, love, loss – it’s very powerful. That’s the stuff that makes it all feel real and worth preserving.
Why Family History Work Matters
Why is family history work important to you?
Cindy: Family history work is important to me because family is important to me. My family heritage is what has made me who I am. However, I have learned over the years that just because I care about family history doesn’t mean everybody else does. Others may love our family every bit as much as I do, but just aren’t as fascinated by the history as I am.
I’m kind of a history person in general, but I also attribute my interest in family history to my Christian heritage, which was the impetus for my own faith. I’ve always felt that to be born into such a huge, close, loving family was a unique blessing for me from day one of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever taken that blessing for granted. I’ve always known I was born into something special.
Create Your Own Family Memorial Group with Reunacy
Preserving family history isn’t just about documenting the past. It’s about honoring the people who shaped your story and passing that legacy on to future generations.
As Cindy’s journey shows, family history doesn’t have to be overwhelming or difficult. With Reunacy, you can easily create a living, growing record of your family’s history that brings people together and sparks meaningful connection.
Whether you’re planning a reunion, building a tribute, or just getting started, Reunacy gives you the tools to turn your family stories into a lasting record, available for generations to come!