Name/Title
Newspaper Sunday Record Aug 18, 1991 124th Annual Reunion PicnicEntry/Object ID
000410Tags
Bull PicnicScope and Content
Annual reunions preserve values
Sunday Record August 18, 1991
By SHELLY GREEN Staff Writer CAMPBELL HALL - Richard Smith left his home in Ferndale, Wash., last Sunday and drove 3,200 miles in his 1974 Volkswagen van to attend his first Bull family reunion. The 65-year-old Smith had an aunt in Virginia who kept him abreast of the family genealogy she was compiling. When she discovered the family was related to the Bulls a few years ago, Smith ended up on the Bull family mailing list. "Every year I get the brochure," said Smith, who is a descendant of Richard Bull, one of the 12 children born to William Bull and Sarah Wells, the first white family to settle in Orange County. "This year I said, 'It's time to do it.'" At a time when families are shrinking and growing further apart, the Bulls and several other clans in the mid-Hudson continue to meet each year to preserve what they describe as the nation's oldest and most sacred institution - the family. Smith and about 375 other Bull descendants gathered yesterday under blue and white awnings on the lawn in front of the Bull Stone House for the 124th Bull family reunion. "I saw a guy down here who looks just like my father," Smith said. The five-member Ramapo Fault String Band played "My Rose of San Antone" and similar songs while Bull descendants feasted on baked ham, fried chicken and German chocolate cake. Jean Garbe of Schenectady, the family genealogist, worked yesterday at a table with loose-leaf binders containing the genealogy of the seventh generation of Bulls and their descendants to the present day. She has material on 4,000 seventh-generation Bulls and she knows of 20,000 people in the United States who can trace their roots back to William and Sarah.
[Photo Caption] Dick Ivory of Union, N.J., left, and Jean Garbe of Schenectady review a Bull genealogy book.
"When others (families) are disintegrating, this one cements," said Garbe. Several Bull family members attribute that cohesion to having a homestead to flock to each year and belonging to a long and well-mapped genealogy.
"This is the homestead of 10 generations of one family living in America," said Michael Brown, 55, an eighth-generation Bull who lives in the Bull Stone House that was built in 1722 and is owned by the family corporation. "It's so biblical," said Alice Mapes, 71, who married a descendant of Samuel Mapes, who settled near Middletown in the mid-1700s. She edits the Mapes family's newsletter and sends out 1,135 to family members across the country. "God created the family and laid that as the basis of everything, the social, the economic, the ecological. "When that's destroyed, your nation is in trouble," Mrs. Mapes said. "That's why it's particularly important now to maintain those ties." Children attending these gatherings see how meaningful it is to their parents, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, she said. "Their moral fiber and social well-being depends on a solid family," Mrs. Mapes said. "We know that we've had a part in it”Relationships
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Bull Picnic