Jill, and Carol are working out the activities for the reunion starting in a little over 2 weeks, and need your input!  The activities that need the most coordination are:

1. The Wednesday night Dinner Buffet
    (Will you, your family be in attendance? How many of you?)

2. The 2 hour boat trip
    (See Carol's comments below)

3. The Friday Night Lobster Dinner - How many lobsters do you want ($12 for a one lobster meal; a second lobster with the meal is an additional $8).  How many want macaroni and cheese instead of lobster?

Please let them know via either direct email, or by responding on the blog, what you are interested in.

And because it would be a shame not to include a photo or 2 on the blog, here are some more.  If you have looked through the photos on the Photo Album, you may have noted a rather consistent connection to the ocean in several photos.  Perhaps this photo of Ward and Linda and some of their children at one of their leisure pastimes will give an indication as to why Stone relatives seem so drawn to the water...  (Check out even more beach photos on the Snapshots page.)

There is the family joke about how Gregory Stone came to the colonies on the good ship “Increase” and how “they have been increasing ever since.”  Ward and Linda had 7 children and those 7 children, our parents and aunts and uncle, had 26 children.  No, I am not going to get into who begets whom.  I am considering myself very fortunate that in less than a month, I will get to see several of those cousins.  We don’t have a specific count yet of who will be here for the reunion, but there will be at least 8 of us first cousins (Linda Jo, Doug, Michael, Larry, Bonnie, Jeffrey, Jill, Carol for starters) plus several of the next generation and the next.  Sadly, there are 3 cousins who will not be in attendance but will be with us in spirit.  Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think of my sister, Gail, and I am sure that is true for Sharon and Christopher, too.  Three of our 26 cousins have died much too young.  Christopher was on a cross-country bicycle trip in 1979, Gail succumbed to cancer after a brief but valiant battle in 1989, and Sharon most recently died after a many year struggle to overcome cancer also.  I know we hold them in our hearts and in that way they will be with us as we gather on Cousins Day.

Sincerely,

Jill Martel

Webmaster's Note:  You can find photos of Gail and Christopher on the Photo Album.  I have included the photo of Sharon and her family here, since I do not have complete information on them or on Sharon's siblings yet.  When I do, I will move her over to the Photo Album with all of them.

James and I will be making a trip out to southern California for Comic Con International (yep, we're nerds) and will drive up to Maine immediately afterwards to be at the reunion.  Due to this I will not likely be making posts after the 13th, since I'll either be wending my way through 150,000 comic and pop-culture fans trying to catch a glimpse of the Walking Dead cast, or on the road.  I will be posting multiple blog posts, and updates throughout the next 2 weeks.  Please check back at least once a week, to see what has been updated.  Unfortunately, Weebly has not made a phone App that will allow me to edit the site from there, or I could do it on the road.  Anyway, below is the first of a series of blog posts from Jill.  I'll be posting the others later this week, and will have more photo posts to add as well.

- Katy

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Thank you, Jennifer, for all of the great pictures of your family that you sent.  Katy has added some of them to the website (check The Photo Album and Snapshots) and will be adding more as she can.  Jennifer came up with a neat way of sending copies of the photos.  She just took a photo of the photo with her phone, and then emailed it to me.  No muss, no fuss.  The photo that came through loses some quality of course, but it makes the task very easy and quick.  So follow suit, my cousins, and send photos pronto. 

As Katy said in the previous blog, July 24 isn’t very far off.  And I am some excited.  A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Colleen and know that she and Jeffrey plan to load their Harleys and begin their journey east on July 12.  Wish them dry skies and clear roads.

Just this past week I spoke with Jane, the manager of the Bay Leaf Cottages and Motel, where a number of us are staying.  Our cottages and rooms are all set.  Jane asked if we could have our lobster dinner on Friday evening instead of Thursday evening as originally planned as she has a Maine Seafood appetizer class scheduled for Thursday evening.  I thought Friday would be all right for everyone so I said okay.  If it absolutely is not, please let me know immediately.  A week before the dinner, we have to let her know how many people are having lobster, how many lobsters for each person, how many people want macaroni and cheese instead, and whether we want baked potato, potato salad, or steak fries as the potato side dish.  I think everyone gets the same, so I guess we will decide by majority vote.  To get more information about the Bay Leaf’s lobster supper, look at their website at www.bayleafcottages.com.  Oh, and Jane said they would set up games such as ping-pong in the garage for people to play while visiting.

Jane told me about the cooking class on Thursday evening.  For $20 for each participant, the class makes and eats a number of dishes including spring roll with lobster tail, pan grilled shrimp, mussels marinara with linguine, a soup with another kind of seafood – much more than appetizers from the sounds of it! 

We have reservations for Saturday night’s meal in the hall of the Rockland Congregational Church.  Carol, Linda Jo, and I had quite a discussion via speaker phone one evening when we decided to keep our last supper of the reunion in casual mode, getting together in a hall where we will have the place to ourselves.  If all goes well, we may have some family photos on display as well as a surprise from Carol.  There is a piano in the hall, so if you can play, please limber up your fingers and we will sing some songs.  Better yet, let Carol and Bill know ([email protected]) you will be bringing an instrument to add to their fiddle and – which instrument is Bill bringing?  Maybe Sue will be able to bring her ukulele.  Here is an interesting aside:  one of the old, old photos that I haven’t scanned yet is of a group of young people, all holding their ukuleles.  One of the students in the photo is Aunt Hazel and the average age of the children is 10 years old or so.  Things do go in cycles.  I just read an article about the increasing popularity of the instrument these days.  So the uke was popular in the 1920s and is becoming popular almost 100 years later.  But I digress.

To get back to the topic of our Saturday supper for a minute, I will just say that the menu is still open.  In keeping with the goal of keeping the evening as relaxed as possible, we will be sticking with a menu of simple comfort and easy food.  It may not be an evening for foodies but we will have a good time visiting, talking, toasting Aunt Mary, and celebrating some birthdays.

We have some ideas of where to have a picnic near the water but really haven’t settled on one place yet.  Marshall Point seems like a good possibility.  There is a lighthouse there, a little museum, and maybe a spot to fish for mackerel.  There are a couple of sandwich shops on the way where the fixings for a picnic could be easily obtained.  However, if I remember correctly, there is no beach or access to the water.  Lucia beach, or Birch Point State Park as it is now known, has a nice beach and gentle water for swimming if one can stand the cold water, but the picnic tables are few and hard to get to as they are up on the rocks along the side of the cove.  I do hope we can go swimming there at least once during our stay as that is Aunt Mary’s favorite place to swim in the ocean.  If we want to picnic near fresh water with some swimming, Megunticook and Chickiewaukee are both possibilities.


- Jill