Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/08/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]... So here goes.....the top of the story.... - --------------------------- Columbia, South Carolina --- This is a story whose beginning is clouded in a fog of oral history, wishful thinking, and family pride. And if the events of the last week are any indication, it is a story that will continue to unfold for generations to come. It begins sometime in the first half of the 19th Century – no one is quite sure when. All that is known for sure about the date is that it occurred during the period when slavery was still the mainstay of the Cuban economy. Than and the central fact that it begins when a young man who was to become known as Jude Bracy was snatched from his home somewhere in West Africa, sold into slavery and shipped to Cuba, where he eventually was sold again and taken to Florida. The more romantic – or roots hungry - of Jude Bracy’s decedents believe that he had a wife and family in Africa, whom he some how brought to America; the more realistic believe that it was here that Jude Bracy fathered 11 children – Henry, Willis, Robert, James, Malachi, Simon, Mary, Martha, and Eva - firmly established the Bracy family in the piney woods of South Carolina in post Civil War America. Recently, more than 100 of the descendents of Jude Bracy came together in a Holiday Inn here, hard by the railroad tracks outside of town, to celebrate being Bracys. They came from as far away as Texas and New Mexico, Queens and Michigan, Boston and Staten Island, and from right here in Columbia for the First Bracy Family Reunion. Their reunion was unique because only they are the Bracys, but in having a family reunion bringing far flung family members together, they joined the countless thousands of American families who hold official reunions. Some of these families, like the Bracys, have never before held a reunion; others come together annually. Some may gather at a picnic ground in an Applachian hollow; others make take their entire family on a cruise up the Alaskan coast. But rich, poor, or, as is usually the case, a little of each, these families will all gather to do the same thing – celebrate being a family. - ------ And the first cut of the digital images...in some sort of story-line order.... http://www.leica-gallery.net/bdcolen/folder-3290.html - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html