By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

The Dimmicks had their first ever family reunion in July.

Alice Betty didn't make it. My dad's only brother Fred married young and raised a large family in Savannah. My first cousins were born between 1913 and 1925, a decade before my parents married. Not surprisingly, I did not know these folks as I was growing up in Pennsylvania, and we've really only recently become acquainted.

They're nice people who have had interesting lives, and I've enjoyed the time I've spent with them. But soon it will be too late.

Our daughter Jean surprised me pleasantly by opting to come to the reunion, and I looked forward to introducing her to my cousins and their children, grands, and great-grands. I especially wanted her to meet Alice Betty, the second oldest and a true survivor who had outlived two husbands, several serious accidents, and breast cancer.

When I first met her, about 10 years ago, we moved instantly from being strangers to being friends, truly family, even though she was then in her 70s and 20 years my senior. Sharp as a tack, despite her health problems, she filled me in on scores of names and dates for the generations following ours. She was delighted with my research and contributed most of the contemporary information I typed into my genealogy program.

The July reunion started at a borrowed beach cottage at Tybee Island, and as we climbed the sun-bleached steps to a large screen porch, I could hear a hubbub of voices, occasional laughter, the squeal of children darting in and out.

Cousin Jack met me at the door with a bear hug. I've known him the best, and have the softest spot in my heart for him because of his resemblance to my father, who died in 1957.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust after the bright sunlight, but I identified Jack's daughters, then Cousins Bob and Claire. Moving from group to group, I registered names and faces, trying to connect the data I had in my computer with the swirl of faces before me. It was futile. Yet a curious sense of belonging surrounded me like the softly moving air from the ceiling fans in that crowded porch.

Cousin Bill, my uncle's oldest (named for my dad, as my brother Fred was named for my uncle), died in 1997. He was reclusive and I never met him.

I was about to say, "What a shame one is missing," when I realized that Alice Betty was not there either. Before the question left my lips, I knew the answer by the stricken looks on their faces. Alice Betty died in February, and was buried on her 85th birthday. And, true to the distance historically between us, no one had let me know.

I spent the next few days trying to sort out names and connections, and just when I thought I had a family group straight, I didn't. It was like a giant moving jigsaw puzzle, and the fact that the divorce rate approaches the national average didn't help at all.

The program for the second day was simple: barbecue at the Bamboo Farm, an experimental cane plantation west of Savannah. We were going to eat, talk, take pictures, talk some more, eat some more just being together.

We arrived first and I had time to tape up two huge genealogy charts I had printed out before leaving home. Now people either like family research or think it's silly and sentimental, and I didn't have a clue into which group this crowd would fall.

I set up shop in a corner and plugged in my laptop. Someone made an announcement that essentially declared me Family Historian and exhorted folks to correct any omissions or errors they found on the wall-chart.

I watched.

A few headed straight for it and spent long minutes studying, tracing lines, trying to understand the complex structure and where they fit in. Others sauntered past, glanced at it casually, and started to walk on then paused, looked again, and became mesmerized. I urged them to jot corrections on it, and little kids seemed to take the greatest delight in finding their own names and writing "THAT'S ME!" in the margins.

It was an unforeseen and unqualified success.

Sunday was highlighted by a low country boil at Cousin Jack's house which backs up on a creek that runs into the nearby Wilmington River. The program was the same: eat and talk.

Jack and Bob poured huge kettles of shrimp and sausage and corn and potatoes onto long tables covered in red-checkered vinyl. Jack's daughters presided over slaw and potato salad, and the beer was icy. We ate until we could hardly move. (Looking back, I'm glad now that we hadn't really launched into our low-fat regimen yet.)

The little ones, of course, were not so immobilized as their elders. Someone had thoughtfully brought along a small runabout and took kids for rides from the dock below the sloping lawn. That left the shade of live oaks and picnic canopies for the adults to escape the sultry heat by pulling chairs together and talking some more.

Of all the stories swapped during that memorable weekend, the two that intrigued me most were not even about my own blood-kin. Come back next week and I'll pass them along...

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