32 – Reunion

Reunion gatherings are a tradition on my mother's side of the family, where large families were common. These kinship gatherings probably grew out of funerals and weddings, and perhaps holiday celebrations. As the majority of the children in a family began surviving childhood, large families became more common, and in a very large family with lots of cousins there may be multiple births, deaths, and marriages every year. 

Greub-Bader-Knaus reunions

Our "reunion" tradition started two generations back, with the descendants of my mother's paternal grandmother Eliza Greub Bader Knaus. The Knaus-Bader gathering of 1927, on a farm near Niwot, Colorado, was one such reunion, memorialized in this photo:

Knaus-Bader gathering circa 1927

The focal point here was my great-grandmother Eliza Knaus shown seated about four from the left just below the large man in the black coat. Eliza was probably the only immigrant here, emigrating from Switzerland in 1854 as young child. The gathering consisted of descendants from her first marriage to Nicolas Bader and their 3 sons, and descendants from her second marriage to Clemens Knaus and their 10 children. 

Eliza Greub Bader Knaus, 1851-1935, in 1927 at age 76

I tried analyzing the photograph more deeply, and I found that there were probably both happy and sad reasons to congregate. I digitized the photo from my aunt Marian Knaus Berryman's collection in 2009; Marian passed away in 2015 at the age of 94; she was one of the young girls in the front row of the photo. She had known many of the people in the photo, and put a key on the back with identifications of about 50 of the 71 people captured. I wondered which of Grandma Eliza's 13 children were present, and if I could figure out the exact year of the gathering: the photo had an associated notation "circa 1920." 

Reunion photo key on back...

After a bit of sleuthing I am fairly confident that it took place in late spring 1927, around the time my mom was born. Eliza had lost two children in the previous months: George Bader in October 1926, and Clemens Edward "Clem" Knaus in January 1927, and neither is identified in the photo; she had previously lost a daughter, Mollie, in 1921, so only 10 of her children were still living in 1927. Clem's widow Katie is shown with her oldest son holding her shoulder. Clem's daughter Helen is shown with her husband Everett Steele; they had married in January 1927, a week before her father's death. 

Ruth Strain Bader is shown with four children, including a small baby; she had 6 in total, but the 4th was Ada Maria born 4 April 1927. Ruth is the one in front left with a baby in her lap. My grandmother is shown in the back without a baby: my mom was born on May 17, 1927, but she may have been sleeping somewhere, so we can't be sure the date was between 4 April and 17 May. But her older siblings are all shown, and appear to be about the age they would have been in 1927, including my uncle Gordon who was born in 1923. 

Six of Eliza's ten living children were present: Will Bader, John Knaus, Albert Knaus, Emma Knaus Oliphant, Dan Knaus, and probably Carl Knaus (at least his wife is in the picture – perhaps Carl was taking the photo). Not in the picture: Frank Bader, Tillie Knaus Hawley (they lived in Oregon), Fred Knaus, and Jessie Knaus Whaley.  

According to her obituary Eliza had 50 grandchildren and 42 great-grandchildren when she died of a stroke in 1935 a couple months shy of her 84th birthday, about 8 years after this reunion. It looks like a few more than half of those 50 grandchildren are in the reunion photo. Her descendants have grown exponentially, to over a thousand today. 

There have been Clemens & Eliza Knaus reunions to present times. I attended some, including one of the last. For a while they held these every summer as a picnic up at Grand Lake. Then it switched to a city park in Longmont (the altitude being a bit of a challenge for some folks). There is nothing stopping us from having another, but as the generations grow, we get to be strangers, and know few of our second or third cousins.

Knaus-Wederquist descendant reunions

I descend from Eliza Greub Knaus' 11th child, Dan Knaus; he married Lillian Wederquist, and they had 8 children, living on a farm outside Niwot (Dan, Lillian, and their first 5 children can be found in the photo above). The children grew up and married, and had families, producing 33 cousins, including 20 in the ten years from 1951 through 1960. 

After my grandparents had passed away, when we cousins had mostly grown up and new families were being created, we started having Dan Knaus and Lillian Wederquist descendant reunions, often with over 100 people. Our last gathering was a picnic in Longmont in August 2022. Here's a photo from one of our reunions, in 1992 at the YMCA in Estes Park:

1992 Estes Park YMCA, Dan & Lillian Knaus descendant reunion

Kenyon-Knaus descendant reunions

I have five siblings, and once we had all made good starts on families of our own, we would get together occasionally for our own reunion, sometimes dovetailing these on Knaus-Wederquist descendant reunions. The last that all six of us siblings attended was in 2006 in northern Wisconsin for a few days; my mom was 79; I think only 5 of the next generation are missing in this photo:

2006 Shirley Knaus Kenyon family reunion, Wisconsin

My mom has been gone since 2011, and we siblings get together occasionally, but haven't put together a big gathering of everyone since then; we are spread out from coast to coast making that difficult. We still have Knaus-Wederquist cousins reunions, but sporadically – the last was a picnic in 2022 in Longmont, Colorado. 

More distant relative reunions

Since I took up genealogy and started finding more distant relatives, there have been a few reunions organized around our more ancient ancestors. There were a couple on my Swedish side (my mother's mother's ancestry) in Illinois, with descendants of my G3 grandmother Christina Larsdotter 1814-1902. And in 2010 we had a reunion of distant Knaus ancestors in Germany, but that is a longer story!