Official Newsletter of the Riley Family Club
Vol. 7, No. 5 .......................................................................................................... May, 2003
Welcome to the Riley Family News family newsletter, dedicated to bringing you current news, photos, obituaries, weddings, engagements, births and special features about our Riley family.. If you are a Riley or descendant of a Riley, this is YOUR family newsletter. Our hope is to have a new edition of the online family newsletter posted at least once a month.
We need your HELP to make the family newsletter a success. When you hear about a death, birth, marriage, engagement or other news about a Riley relative, please let us know. If you see an obituary, wedding or engagement announcement, birth notice or any news article in your local newspaper, please clip these out, along with the name and date of the paper from the top of the page and send to us to preserve in the Riley Family Library and to print in the newsletters.
If you came directly to the newsletter, be sure and visit the Riley Family Association HOME page. From there, you can jump to the family HISTORY section, the family QUERIES section, the "FAMOUS RILEYS" section and our other pages. Click on "BACK" to HOME at the bottom of this page to get started.
LOOKING FOR A RILEY ANCESTOR? Post a message in the Queries section and you just may find another relative who has the very information or records you are searching for.
COLUMBUS, Ga.-- Jessica Shea Riley was one of the contestants who participated in the "Miss Georgia" beauty pageant in Columbus in June. Jessica won the "Miss Gwinnett County" pagent earlier and represented that county on the northeast side of metropolitan Atlanta in the state pageant, which is part of the "Miss America" contest.
Jessica, 22, is a nursing student at Atlanta's Emory University. Sorry, we have no info on who her parents and where they are originally from.
If your branch of the family is planning a reunion, please let us know complete details so we can write a story about it. Include the dates, time, place and name, mailing address, telephone number and email address if available of a person to contact for more information. If it is an annual event, include some history: when and where it began, who started it and other details.
AFTER the reunion, send in details for a story: include how many attended, who traveled the greatest distance, the youngest and oldest; entertainment, history program and other events. If you have a reunion committee, include the names and hometowns of officers.
OMRO, WI.-- The O'Reilly - Riley family reunion will be held at Omro, Wisconsin 8 July. The festivities will begin with a mass by Father Carr at St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church at 10:30 AM.
A picnic at Marble Park will follow the church service. There will be old-time Irish fiddlers performing as well as a professional story teller, Janie Jasin.
St. Thomas Aquinas Church became the focus of a community of Irish immigrants and has been the center of their heritage since just after the War for Southern Independence. One of its parishoners, Alexander O'Rielly, served in Company D, 32nd Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry of the union army during the war. He was wounded and returned home to marry 17- year old Mariah Flanigan, the first marriage performed in the church. The setting of the church is rural and bucolic, a small white country church with all the stained glass windows stating who donated them. Hugh Mongan was the first to be buried in the church cemetery, just after the war. Every two years, we get together and sing and share old photos and remember the brave pioneers who shaped our lives. And now we are trying to give back and restore the little church so we can have special services and celebrations without it falling down around us. It would be so wonderful if just one person could find his ancestors because of this reunion, so they could also see this place and future generations could see how beautiful simplicity can be.
Some of the ancestral names of the church are: O'Reilly, Riley, Mongan, Broderick, Bruise, Carey, Cleary, Conlin, Crowley, Flanigan, Gavin, Gilrain, Hefran, Kilalea, Kinney, Manley, Moran, Morrissey, Neary, O'Connell, O'Rourke, Quigley, and Sullivan.
For reunion information, contact:
Mary Jeanne Bray-Monhardt
BLANCHARD, La.-- Descendants of Mason Sellers Riley and Verta Lee Collins held their annual reunion here 25 Oct. in Blanchard at the home of Richard Laux, a great grandson of Mason and Verta. This was their tenth gathering. Mason was born in 1887 in Dale County, Alabama. He and two of his brothers, Jasper and Moses, moved from Alabama to Miller County, Arkansas in the early 1900's. Their families spread from there to adjoining areas of Louisiana and east Texas, with most of the descendants living within a 50 mile radius of Shreveport, La. today. Mason and Verta were married in 1913 and they had three children: Imoga Frances, Mildred Margaret, Middleton Sellers and Hazel Virginia.
The family has met previously at homes of relatives in east Texas and southern Arkansas. The oldest relative attending the gathering was Imoga Frances Riley Barrington, 83, of Deberry, Texas. Frances was born 7 June, 1914. The youngest was Victoria Riley Pace, 18 months old who is the granddaughter of Mildred. Kinfolks came to the reunion from several towns in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and as far as Pensacola, Florida, according to Norma Roberts DeBrow, daughter of Mildred. The reunion will be held next year at the home of Hazel in Shreveport, La.
HEIBERGER, Ala.-- Descendants of Jasper Newton Rylee (Riley) will hold their first annual reunion at the Heiberger, Alabama Community Center 19 April. Please bring a covered dish dinner for the meal about 12:30 PM. For further info, contact us at Dan Nicolei or call us at (334)683-8431, (205) 926-9661 or (205) 926-4333.
If you have a kid graduating from high school or college; who has been named to a school honors roll; been elected to a school office; who plays on a school sports team; been named a cheerleader; or any other school news, let us know so we can write about it in the family newsletters. Also tell the child's school history and if graduating, what their future plans are (college, work?). Also include the names of their Riley grandparents.
Our Editor is R. E. Woodham,
descendant of a Riley family who settled in Dale, Henry and surrounding counties in
southeast Alabama in the 1830's, coming there from Old Darlington District, SC.
His hobby since childhood had been family history.
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