It was a fine day for a 250th anniversary get together at John Corbly Memorial Baptist Church in Garards Fort. For the 20-some descendants of Reverend Corbly and his three wives – Abigail, Elizabeth and Nancy – who came on August 29, it was a chance to not only make up for the Corbly Family Reunion missed in 2020, but join with regular churchgoers to celebrate 250 years in the land of Goshen that their patriarch brought forth in 1771 when he founded the church that now bears his name.
Sunday service was packed with parishioners and descendants who then posed outside like the gathering of 1914 when a Baptist revival filled the front steps and the photographer had to climb on a ladder to get everybody in. Today, it was Twisted Lens taking the shot that will be added to scrap books, uploaded, and shared with cousins on every branch of the Corbly family tree.
This far-flung family reunion has been returning to Garards Fort every last Sunday in June since 1932 but early summer COVID-19 worries pushed the date to the edge of fall. The schedule of events remained traditional – a 9am service followed by presentations of all things Corbly starting at 11am. Anniversary plaques and proclamations presented by county, state and federal representatives lay on tables in the decorated church basement, along with Corbly history that Deacon Dave Reid and others had on display. Lunch was a delicious stuffed croissant brown bag affair catered by Corbly descendants, and the big anniversary cake and coffee made guests linger to reminisce some more.
For Helena Morris Hurst of Gold River, California, who won the prize for coming the furthest, this was her long anticipated first visit. “I saw the Corbly website a few years ago and found out I’m a descendent of Abigail.” After retiring, Hurst thought about attending for years, but was stymied by COVID-19 in 2020. That made her make up her mind to “definitely come this year. I told my husband I was going and here I am! I’m leaving on Tuesday so I’ve had almost a week to explore where my ancestors are from. I’m starting to feel like I belong here.”
Her first visit to Cornerstone Genealogy in Waynesburg helped her find not just one local cousin to welcome her into the family, but two.
Genealogical Society president David Cressey put Hurst in touch with Cornerstone volunteer Kathy Morris Miller and her husband Bill Miller who live on the Morris family Bicentennial farm in Fordyce. “Helena and I are related on the Morris side back to when Abigail’s daughter Margaret married George Morris. Bill is a descendant of John and Abigail and also third wife Nancy, so the three of us are cousins,” Kathy explained later when I called to make sure I was getting it right. “Don’t worry about it. Bill says the best thing to say is we’re cousins!”
At the reunion, Helena told me “I spent all afternoon Saturday with Kathy and Bill doing our family tree. I’ve been to the historical society in Washington too. This has been a wonderful experience, I’ve learned so much about my roots here.”
There were Corbly family books charting the genealogical details of the three wives written by Don Corbly to browse during the reunion. These books are also in the stacks at Cornerstone where volunteers like Kathy Morris Miller can help newbies track down ancestors of the many families that pioneered the Western Frontier.
As lunch lingered, the finer points of lineage mingled with happy exchanges between kith and kin spending quality time together while the next gen scooted around tables with two-year-old Weston Knight from Windsor Heights WV, winner of this year’s door prize for being the youngest Corbly here.
Things wrapped up when Lena Hawkins Galing auctioned off her traditional whisky cake, a cheerful shout out to the rebellion that got the good Reverend in such hot water in 1794.
Before bidding in the Baptist basement, Lena assured the crowd that alcohol bakes out leaving nothing but flavor and boiling the sugar and whisky drench before pouring it over the finished cake has the same affect. Nevertheless, this year’s winning bid brought in a hefty pledge of Federal dollars.
Descendants finished out the afternoon visiting the stations of the historic family cross – Garards Fort Cemetery with its monument to the Corbly family, a quiet walk to the ravine where the marker to the massacre stands, then a short drive to the Corbly homestead, just over the hill from the cemetery to contemplate the distance through the forest where the family took its fateful shortcut to the log cabin meeting house by Garard’s fort on May 10, 1782.
I caught up with a cluster of cousins standing together at the John Corbly family monument, surrounded by mossy stones and crowned with a spectacular view of the hills around Garards Fort. Helena Morris Hurst was there, along with Bill Miller, Terry Hickman of Parrish Florida who is retired and travels around the country researching his genealogy and Jeff and Cathy Shull of Clarmont Indiana, who are keepers of the original Corbly bible.
I asked them to get as close as COVID-19 allowed and saved their smiling faces for the collective Corbly scrapbook.
And to round out the list of this year’s door prize winners for oldest and who came the shortest distance, it was 81 year old Ted Cree of Garards Fort who drives his sports car to Corbly Church on Sunday and Aleita Hall, who lives just down the road.
See you next year!