The Robertsons, the Sutherlands, and the Making of Texas

Chapter 22. Family Reunions

chapter 22 Family Reunions the sutherland-rogers reunions The three Sutherland-Rogers families and the Rogers-Witt family began having reunions so that the thirty-two double first cousins could get together. Their grandparents, Thomas Shelton Sutherland and Samuel Rogers, each had twelve children, but only sixteen of these twenty-four firstborn Texans lived to adulthood. The first gathering , held in the summer of 1930, was attended by eight of the nine living first-generation Texans who were the children of Sutherland and Rogers: Talitha Menefee White, William DePriest Sutherland, Belle Sutherland Faires, Clark Rogers, Rosa Rogers Witt, Lizzie Laura Sutherland, and Emma and Minnie Sutherland, as well as the widows of Frank and Mack Rogers. Of that group, only Mamie Sutherland Crockett was unable to come, but 110 of their descendants gathered.1 The reunion was so successful that a second get-together was held the next year and another one in 1934, this time on the Texas coast. In 1936 the fourth meeting was held, when only Belle Sutherland Faires was left of the first-generation Sutherlands; all of the Rogers brothers and sisters were still living, however. The men went fishing together, the women laid out on long tables the home-cooked food they had brought, the “cousins” ran off and got to know each other, and everyone talked the whole time. The last of these early gatherings took place in 1940, and then the war intervened.2 In 1948 more than 150 Sutherland-Rogers relatives convened, hungry for news of their kinfolk and stories about their origins. The next get-together did not occur until 1952, and at that reunion Minnie Sutherland, Clark Rogers , and Emma Sutherland, who, as the last of the first-generation Texans, embodied the living memory of the American history of Texas, suggested that there be a family meeting every year.3 Their gentle statements became an eleventh commandment. The reunions are now an annual event. When we congregate, we pay homage to those who came before us, listen to the stories of their Texas adventures, and get to know the next generation. These assemblies have been the vital conduit of a sense of family, of Texas identity, Family Reunions 185 and of the art of storytelling. We continue to pass down the tales of our forebears , who arrived in Texas in 1830. By 1957 Florence Sutherland Hudson, daughter of Thomas S. Sutherland II and Lizzie Rogers Sutherland, had put together a book called We Cousins , which records the genealogy and history of these families. Everyone got a copy. In 1958 the reunion had grown to 237 relatives, and the family began renting the entire Garner State Park in Uvalde, named after “Cactus Jack” Garner, Uvalde’s favorite son and vice president to Franklin Roosevelt. Cactus Jack was a favorite character, a blunt-speaking, colorful man who once said the vice presidency wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. The get-togethers were held there until 1967. I remember the one in 1958 as the most fun of my whole teen-anguished thirteenth year. I could hardly wait for the reunion in 1959, where I met 231 of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Since I grew up going to these gatherings, when I had children of my own, I brought them as often as I could, even from faraway places such as England and Minnesota, so they too could learn what family and Texas meant. the robertson reunion The Robertsons were not the child-producing machines that the Sutherland and Rogers families were. A more patrician and prickly lot, they also were not as close. They did, however, have their own single moment of reunion . In 1936, during the centennial of Texas independence from Mexico, celebrations all over the Lone Star State spurred a movement to transfer the remains of the heroes of early Texas colonization and the war of independence to the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. The cemetery is on a beautiful, peaceful hill just east of the state capitol, now in one of the poorest parts of town. There you will find the heroes of early Texas buried alongside the revered writers and intellectuals of Texas history: J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb, as well as my father, who sneaked in, thanks to the influence of his sister Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird Johnson’s former press secretary. In December 1935 Sterling C. Robertson’s remains were disinterred from his burial place in Robertson County and brought...