The First Kingsley Heritage Celebration and Kingsley Family Reunion

The Kingsley family on the steps of their ancestral home.
Photo: NPS, 1998.

This is a portrait of the first reunion Kingsley family reunion, held during the fist Kingsley Heritage Celebration in 1998 at Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida. The lady (a Kingsley descendant of the Gibbs line I believe, and obviously the family matriarch) who is next to my mother (who's blocking the sun with her hands), on the fourth step up wearing a white dress (my face is partly visible right behind her), kindly brought amazing home cooked fried chicken and biscuits, which we all enjoyed as a picnic on the grounds of the Plantation. You haven't tasted fried chicken until you have Southern home made fried chicken, and from a Kingsley to boot ;)

That night the same lady along with our other Kingsley "cousins" invited us for dinner at the historic Florida House Inn on Amelia Island. It was an amazing evening in an amazing place, one which I will never forget. My paternal grandmother (not on the Kingsley side) belonged to the first Dominican protestant church (a minority in a Catholic country, especially before the spread of storefront protestant groups) and though she spoke not a word of English, she and the senior Gibbs folks sang along to old Presbyterian church hymns, each in their language, as grandma knew the melodies but with the Spanish lyrics. Unfortunately I have not seen pictures of that dinner, nor do I remember if any were taken...

For more on the history of the Kingsley Heritage Celebration, click here.