By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

The best part of a family reunion may be the stories traded under shade trees and over plates of barbecue.

I became the newly ordained family historian at the first ever reunion on my father's side last July, probably because I'm the only member of the family who has a genealogy program and a lap top, and knows how to use them. But rather than recording some previously unknown family lore for eternity, what I got was mainly names and birth dates of new tots belonging to distant cousins I can't keep straight except electronically.

The best stories I heard at the reunion were about in-laws, and not blood relatives, and me without a clipboard anyhow.

My favorite was about my cousins' grandmother on their mother's side that would have been my uncle's mother-in-law and no kin to me at all, darn it. One cousin says Granny Snyder was a midwife, another that she was a healer of all sorts of illnesses.

The story goes that whenever a baby was born in the community too sick to survive, and the doctors had given up, they'd bring it to Granny Snyder. She'd take the child up to an attic room that was strictly off-limits to the family. No one ever knew what happened there. After several days, a week, sometimes longer, Granny Snyder would emerge, with the child healed. Granny herself would take to her bed for as much as two weeks, utterly spent.

Years later when she died, people from all walks of life came to her funeral. And when my cousins, now teens, finally climbed up to the forbidden attic room, they found mysterious powders, herbs drying in the rafters, but nothing particularly bizarre. "What do you suppose happened in that room?" Cousin Claire mused. "Something happened, I'm sure. Maybe it was simply prayer, so intense that Granny Snyder herself was exhausted by it.

"Whatever it worked. They say she never lost a single baby entrusted to her care."

Several years ago, when I first got serious about family history, I visited Savannah to learn whether my cousins knew any more than I did, and added some details about their spouses. When I asked Cousin Bob's wife Maddie for her maiden name, she hesitated, then said she was adopted and had only recently learned her birth name. When we had a private moment, this white-haired Savannah lady, mother of three, grandmother of five, told me her story.

She had always known she was adopted, she said, but had never, ever sought information about her teenaged birth mother. She stated emphatically that she had been raised in privilege, by parents who adored their only child and gave her an almost magical life. A talented artist, her paintings sell in galleries all over Savannah, and she teaches in a studio Bob built her behind their home.

Her life has been so perfect, she wanted to do nothing that could possibly bring her parents sorrow. But now they were dead, and almost by accident she had found out not only her name, but that she has two half-brothers living here in Georgia. (So as not to risk embarrassing Maddie, I've changed her identity and won't mention her brothers' city.)

Should she contact them? she wondered aloud. I asked her what her family thought about it, and she said they were fully supportive. She was torn between loyalty and curiosity. I sensed that she really wanted to do this, and encouraged her.

At the reunion this past July, I finally had a chance to ask Maddie if she had met her brothers. Her light blue eyes fairly burned with excitement as she answered: Yes! Yes she had, and just last fall.

Maddie and Bob have lived in Savannah for many years and have friends all over the state. She asked a friend in her brothers' town if he would speak to them for her. When told they had an older half-sister who wanted to meet them, their response was denial. No way could their sainted mother have had a child out of wedlock, and then surrender the baby for adoption.

The go-between was convincing, telling them things Maddie knew about her mother that no stranger could have known, and at last they agreed to a meeting, over the strenuous objections of their own adult children who revered the memory of a beloved grandmother not long dead. One daughter in particular was certain that this woman from Savannah was an impostor who would bring heartache at best, exploitation at worst.

Negotiations were long and painstaking; I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say, shortly before Thanksgiving last year, Maddie traveled to the home of one of the brothers. Both met her there, and received her like the long-lost sister she was. And in the back of the room, Maddie saw the nay-saying daughter turn visibly pale and lean against a wall for support. She said it was as though her grandmother was standing before her that familiar face, those pale blue eyes, the halo of white hair, her mannerisms, her speech. There was no denying who Maddie was.

At 73, for the first time in her life, Maddie has a family of her own. And Thanksgiving is a whole new celebration.

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