A weekend in the country!

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Julie - Well, we have just returned from our "weekend in the country"...attending our first ever Poulter Family Reunion...and what a weekend it was! Let's start at the beginning...

About a year ago, my Dubbo family members decided that it was time to hold a reunion for our Poulter family and invite not only our oldest aunties and uncles but all the extended clan, including cousins some of us had never met. The date was set down for the Easter long weekend in 2008. For many months leading up to the event, the Dubbo mob was hard at work, organising the venue, the food and the entertainment. I was also very busy working on researching as much as I could about our family history and then working on presentations and posters, etc. I gave a few members of the family some tasks to help me with presenting our history and they got to work researching and writing their pieces.

Finally, the big day dawned and as 4pm rolled around, people starting arriving at the venue. Cousins that hadn't seen each other for 20 years caught up, some met for the first time and our eldest generation got to see all that they had created - I hope they were impressed with us all!!! All up we had about 60 family members show up, some travelling from Sydney and the Central and South Coasts of NSW.

We had a professional photographer come along and take pics of us in our finest gear. And then it was into the hall to start the presentations. These went for about an hour and a half and included talks on our ancestry, our brave family members who fought in WW1 and some funny stories about my great grandparents, Bert and Eileen, from whom every Poulter at the reunion was descended. We finished off with a prayer for our family and then a photo slideshow of memories that spanned the 1930s till the present day.

We then had dinner and proceded to dance the night away. I think the final hangers-on went to bed about 6am. There were some tired people the next day! But we continued on and we all went out to my mum's farm and had another great day, with a BBQ lunch and games in the afternoon. I think I can say that everyone really enjoyed themselves and we hope to all catch up again in a year or two when the Poulter Book is launched.

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