Family reunions have been an important facet of my life, a source of continuity in an ever changing world. And you could say they gave birth to my life — and the lives of my brothers and sisters —because my parents were fourth cousins who met at a Gramling-Link family reunion so many, many decades ago.

My mom was from Eagle and my dad from Dousman. And while today, it’s a short drive between the two in Western Waukesha County, back then, they were pretty much isolated from each other with each of them being pretty much self-contained villages.

And as we were growing up as kids, there were still Gramling-Link reunions, bringing together disparate parts of the family from all over Waukesha County and beyond to my Uncle Bill Gramling’s farm just west of the village limits of Dousman. I remember my Uncle Bill — he wasn’t my actual uncle, but was my dad’s first cousin — roasting corn on a grill. It was a fun-filled afternoon with organized games like the egg toss and we also went swinging on a rope into a pile of hay in the barn.

Those were fun times that continued on through the years in various shapes and forms — and at various venues — with the responsibility for organizing them rotating from family to family and eventually to the next generation. I took my turn organizing them when in the mid-1980s when my children, Jennifer and Andrew, were pretty young. I felt it was important for them to know the extended family, to know their roots on my side of the family.