2009 Gordy Reunion

03 May 2009
This year we have information on three Gordy reunions scheduled in Georgia, Texas and Mississippi. ALL GORDY’S ARE WELCOME!! Please come and join us.

The Georgia reunion will be on Saturday, May 16 at the Elsie Holmes Nature Park in Ringold GA. It will begin at 9:30 AM and wrap up about 5:00 PM. Directions and additional information are available.

The West Texas reunion will be held on June 13-14, 2009 in Denver City TX. The gathering will be from 9:30 AM until to 3:30 PM at the Community Center, 515 W. 15th Street. Additional information and family updates are available.

The Mississippi reunion will be held Saturday June 27 and Sunday June 28. We will meet Saturday morning at 10:00 in the Decedar Baptist Church Fellowship Hall (map & directions provided) and on Sunday about 10 at Fred and Eileen Gordy’s house. More information.

Gordy is considered a rare surname. Having a rare name sometimes spawns strange behavior. Have you ever upon arrival at a far-from-home hotel pulled the telephone book from the bedside table drawer and looked for a Gordy? If you found a listing, did you call this stranger, believing ,“We are all related.”? And then there is the legend -- “There were seven brothers who came from England.” And the speculation -- “There are a lot of Gordon's, maybe we are actually Gordon's, misspelled.”

About seven years ago two Gordy sisters, who as children had wondered if they were the only Gordys in the world, set out to search for their relatives and their origins. Barbara and Melinda found Gordys, lots of them. The living and the marks of the deceased finally led them to the family origins over 300 years ago on the Eastern Shore of Delmarva and forward through 200 years of migrations into Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. In their travels and research they found several family branches with written genealogies and stories and worked in the halls and carrels of many courthouses, libraries, archives and museums.

In the early summer of 2006 Barbara and Melinda attended the Mississippi Gordy Reunion and brought with them pre-publication copies of The Gordy Family Story, their wonderful book of well researched genealogy and touching documented stories on the origins of the Gordy family. As the Mississippi group read, asked questions, and tried to absorb it all, we all begin talking at once; brainstorming ways to share and help extend this information that we had never dreamed we would have.

This web site hopes to help Gordys get in touch with each another, to share what is now known about our family history, and to encourage all to help fill the gaps. A web site is always a work in progress. Stay tuned , as we work together we may solve more of those rare surname questions!

You glanced at the top of this page and thought, “OK, a Gordy Family logo, but why the R?”
            In the 1600s most folks could neither read nor write. Public documents were commonly written by clerks, a respected profession. After a document was completed and read to the involved party, their acknowledgement was indicated by a labeled mark, almost always an X, witnessed by a literate third party.
            The mother of the Gordy family progenitors, Moses and Peter, was a woman named Rosamond Crouch. Although Rosamond was illiterate she learned as a young woman to draw a script R. Throughout her life she used this as her mark. Its use is so distinctive that a quick scan of microfilm records for her R rapidly locates the documents to which she was a party.
            While her R represented Rosamond Crouch, it is only a part of what was distinctive about her. As we discovered and pieced together her story we slowly realized the extent of the legacy that she has left this family. And her R came to represent for us our gift from Rosamond, a special family and what it means to be family.
Read more about Rose.