Your webmaster's interview with Cousin Katherine "Katie" (Hackney) Luby about updating her genealogy of the branch of Moses McKay called "The Twelve Tribes of Moses McKay". If you want to contact her she can be reached at unicornleather@hotmail.com The memory ran out on my video camera right before the interview officially ended but I believe we got all that needed to be said regarding the "Twelve Tribes of Moses McKay".

     On Saturday, August 12, 2011, 165 cousins and friends from 11 states gathered at the 4-acre picnic site at 5353 Gurneyville Road, northwest of Wilmington for the 146th annual Collett-McKay Picnic. Trustee Steve Collett opened the event with prayer. He reported a concern about the now $500 real estate tax for the site.

     During the 1924 picnic, attendees passed the hat and collected $258 to buy the picnic site from the estates of Virginia and Harriet Collett, daughters of Daniel Haines and Charity Hackney Collett. They had inherited it from Daniel McKay Collett, their older half-brother. He had inherited it from Moses McKay, his grandfather, who outlived Daniel McKay Collett's mother, Virginia McKay Collett. Moses bought it as part of his 1000-acre purchase in 1805 from the surveyor, Nathaniel Massie.

     Deaths and births since the last picnic were announced. Ellen and Bob Currie, first-timers from Fairfax Station, Virginia, were introduced and immediately accepted. Ellen had read about the picnic on the www.robertmackayclan.com website. She said her mother once had a Howard Collett genealogy blueprint, and she knew she had relatives in SW Ohio.

     After the picnic, in a scrapbook kept by Anne Doster Cossum, 1894-1976, your recorder found copies of two earlier picnic stories. He is sending these to Mike McKay at steer_family@hotmail.com to be put on the above website. In the story of the August 12, 1916 picnic, the long tables, first used in 1876 and still used in 2011, are mentioned. Hiram Poore, a colored man, again made the many gallons of coffee and tea for the 275 attendees, in the same iron kettles as in previous years, hung on a pole over a huge fire.

     The 1916 group broke a no speech custom to hear Frank McKay's poem.

For half a century under these trees
Have met the clans of Collett-McKay
And of annual gatherings like to these
The fiftieth we celebrate today.

And to the great giver of all our good
Our thanksgiving and grateful praise
Here in His temple in this leafy wood
Our voices in his tribute raise.

From the old French Huguenots came the one-
Other from Scotland's rock-bound shore;
Through time's cycle a century a run
Since forefathers looked these lands o'er.

Stalwart indeed, and staunch and strong were they,
Blazing the path through wood and plain,
And built and sowed, preparing the way
That their lives not be lived in vain.

First came the Collett, then the McKay,
In the days when the state was young;
They came blazing the trail-making their way-
Their guiding star o'er these lands hung.

Fifty years! For us how quickly they fly!
Yet changes vast indeed are these;
How many are absent that you and I
Once loved to meet under these trees.

Here's to the Colletts, may they prosper still,
And here's the same to the McKays;
Whether French or Scotch, may it be His will
Many more meetings like today's.

At last when the reunion for us all,
And Nations tread the heavenly ways,
O, may there be none by the wayside fall
From clans of Colletts or McKays.

     Out of state attendees at the 2011 picnic included Luella and Robert Rowsey, Opelika, Alabama; Virginia Collette Green, Radondo Beach, Cali.; Rachel Pidgeon, Denver, and Virginia, Mary, and Raymond Sell, Boulder, Colo.; Fred Markar and Robin Fabian, Bartlett, and Karen and Charles Fabian, Des Plaines, and Jason Inwood, Jr., Lebanon, Ill.; Patricia and Jim Giesting, Glenwood, Iowa; Sally and David Sell, Richmond, Ky.; Dave and Adam Doster, Novi, Mich.; Marilyn Talmage, Nashville, Tenn.; Kim, Delwyn, Zoe, Emma, Seth, and Caleb Price, Midvale, Utah; Ellen and Bob Currie, Fairfax Station, and Michael McKay, Maria and Sierra Brock, Winchester, Va.