Vick Family Newsletters

Earlier I wondered how many Vick Family reunions there will be this year. I received one reply, from Katie. She told me about a reunion I was not familiar with. She said the descendants of Joseph S. Vick will hold their biannual reunion in Shamrock, TX the third weekend in June.

In some cases families use newsletters to record and report what happened at a family reunion. Newsletter can be very helpful to those who could not attend a reunion and also to future generations who want to know their family’s history. That leads me to wonder how many newsletters there are (or have been) about Vick families. As the editor of the Vick Family Newsletter published by the Joseph Vick Family of America, I am very familiar with that one newsletter. Past issues contain many articles about JVFOA reunions.

It would be nice to learn about other Vick family newsletters, especially ones about Vick families in other countries. Even if a newsletter is no longer published, it would be valuable to know when another family did publish a newsletter and where copies of the newsletter can be found. Perhaps we can use these different newsletters to aid in discovering how all of our Vick families are related. It would be unfortunate for any newsletters to be lost.

In 1985 James M. Perrin edited and published the first newsletter for the Joseph Vick Family of America. In that first newsletter he wrote about a reunion being planned for the 8th and 9th of June 1985 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA. He also referenced a past reunion held in 1975. Surely there must have been at least one Vick family that had a newsletter before 1985 and surely there is at least one other Vick family somewhere in the world that publishes a newsletter today.

One thing that is common between the first issue of the Vick Family Newsletter and the most recent issue is that paying the cost of printing and distributing a newsletter is a challenge. James M. Perrin said on page one of the first Vick Family Newsletter “I am advancing the money necessary to publish and distribute this Newsletter pending receipt of additional dues.” Since blogs can reach a worldwide audience with no printing and distribution costs perhaps they will replace printed newsletters. Fortunately, we also have vehicles like Facebook and MyFamily to advertise reunions. These same vehicles also allow us to share and preserve photographs and descriptions of what happened at the reunions. Maybe these new ways of communicating will also help us preserve our Vick family history wherever we are in the world.