Was surfing on line, just researching family history...

I am lucky due to the fact that my family history dates in places all the way back to Jamestown Va on my grandfather's side.

But this time I was researching my grandmother's side of the family. Came across this from a Book published in 1952, about historical sites and trips thru West Virginia...

Flat Top, 3350 ft altitude, Pop 30...

a tiny trade center on the mountain plays host for two days in Mid August each year to some 75,000 guests who come to attend the Lilly Family Reunion, held annually since 1930.

Robert Lilly was one of three sons, of an associate of Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore who came to Maryland in 1640. All three sons migrated, one to Georgia, another to the Kanawha Valley, the third "Father" Robert Lilly married Mary Fanny Moody.

The couple left Maryland in 1732 to settle at the mouth of the Bluestone River, about 10 miles east of Flat Top. Father Robert Lilly died in 1810, aged 114 years oldand his wife Fanny died in 1807, aged 110 years old

They were the first permanent and continual settlement started in what is now the state of West Virginia....

seems a little 'iffy' that they could have lived to be those kind of ages back in those times...but records indicate their birth years as 1696, and their dates of death were on their original grave stones... which were moved in the 1950s, when the small town of Lilly, was to be underwater due to a new damn being built...

They are interned at the Family Reunion Grounds at Flat Top..

Here is a pic of their grave marker after they were relocated during the 1950s...



Guess clean mountain living back in those times...

Digging into this sort of stuff is fun and amazing what you can find...even tho my family has a lot of traceable history, still doesn't mean everyone else doesn't have some great family history to share...each of you are descendants of people who were alive in those days as well...

These are the folks that started this country and gave us what we have today....

John, that is some interesting stuff. We can trace Dad's family back, generation by generation, to the 1300s in England. Mom's as well, back to Bavaria and Austria, even earlier.
Here is a picture of me with Mom, her Dad, and his Dad, the one with the beard. Peter Wesley was born in 1849, SW Virginia.

next, is picture of Joseph Sampson, PW's father, who was born in 1821, again in SW VA. That is the furthest back I can go with pictures.

Se afire. Wasn't there a famous lion & bear hunter named Bob Lilly . Is there a branch of the family that left W Va. and moved out west by chance.

That was Ben Lilly

My wife and I took the family to Gettysburg for the first time. Well, except for my father-in-law, whose been there and studied enough to teach tour guides. He's big on genealogy and traced three of his ancestors to the Civil War. Two fought for the north and one for the south, who was actually a governor after the war. One of them who fought for the north signed up for two additional tours. Pretty amazing for the time.

Just here in Oregon alone, I am aware of a branch of the Lilly family that settled up north by Portland, and another over by LaGrande OR.

The Lilly Family Reunion held on Flat Top, has made the Guinness World Book of Records, multiple times as both the largest family reunion held in the USA but also in the World several times. People show up from every state in the country. Haven't been to one since I was a kid.

Just this week, discovered that I am related to another forum member here on the Campfire.. I'll let him remain anonymous, until he wants to step up and admit, he's related to Seafire... some might consider than an embarrassment.

but if someone has the last name of Lilly or Meadows, in North America, Australia, NZ, Canada or from the home country, Great Britain, they are probably related.. both date back to the Norman Conquest in Britain and even further back in Normandy...
which were descendants of Vikings who occupied the north coast of France, before 1000 AD.

Boatloads of Lilly's and Meadows here in the new river valley[as you know]
Good friends with some of them.
Kin to any McCoys[from McCoy]?

If you really want to get involved with it, pay ancestry.com $90 for their DNA test kit.

You send it in and they tell you the DNA makeup of your ancestry.

That in itself is interesting enough, but ancestry.com is also compiling a data base which will list all of your relatives who have been tested.

They listed several hundred relatives of mine in their database. Some of them are very close relatives that I have lost track of over the years.

I'm afraid that if Lilly blood entered ancestry.com data base it would crash the whole system.
The reunion is a sight to see. No matter the time, day or night some old timer will be up on stage with a banjo or fiddle and a pretty girl with a voice 5x bigger than she is.
If you polite to the locals you just might get to sample some moonshine made with water from springs that have been pumping sense the beginning of time.
If your driving thru and you see a group of men out front of the local store and there squatting down saying their hello's, don't worry there not crazy. They are miners. They, just like their fathers and the grandfathers live their life in a 20" seam of coal deep down under those hills.
I long for the days when you could load the truck with friends and beers and hit the back roads of Panthers Knob. Skinny dipping with the girls at the Blue Hole on Streeter creek was pure heaven.
If you have Lilly blood in you there are no strangers in this world. They're just family that you haven't met yet.
Sea Fire, I have no problem owning up to having your blood in my veins.

Aww hell, another one with ties....

Obama, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton went all the way back to Africa together to look up their family tree only to have a monkey schittt in their faces. True story.

Seafire, I live about 20 minutes from Flat Top and I also have a 29 acre place about 7 miles from Flat Top on Ellison Ridge road.

Lot's of Indian history also. Bluestone Lake took the old cemetery you are referring to.

It's a small world. My SIL is a Lilly. Hundreds of Lilly's around here.

Les...are you talking about Streeter near Cool Ridge, WV?

Here's Everett Lilly, the king of Lilly music:

https://youtu.be/yb4YJrBk_68

Ben was quite a character:

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-benllilly.html

I know where that Lilly reunion happens to take place. I killed a deer not that far from there with another forum member here. Very pretty area if you don't kill yourself in the hollers.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/1c/d3/ac/1cd3acf477aa9dca91433c4528bf1aa5.jpg

Yes Sir. That is my old stomping grounds. Born and raised on Ellison Ridge on the Jumping Branch side.

That's pretty cool. My property is half way down Dunn's Road from Ellison Ridge road. Bought if from the Clarks in '72.

My grandpa and his brother owned the property in the Bluestone river valley on river left from around Pipestem down to what is now Bluestone lake and all the Little Bluestone creek area that was later donated to the national park service.
I spent so much of my younger years on those hills that one leg is still shorter than the other.

Going down the mountain would it be on your left, nice little field with a gate blocking the entrance?
I ran out of gas one night in the truck after a night of backroad drinking right about where your property is and had to walk to Jumping Branch. I was dead sober by the end.

Les, it's a little further down from that gate, around a curve and there are two gates. One goes toward the right up a little dirt road and the other elbows down left and that one goes to ours. It was some of the Meador's old "home place". I have nearly had heart attacks dragging deer out of the "holler" down the creek bed from the old house we have which is about to fall in. I have killed many copperheads around that old house. It's so secluded that a person could go without clothes and never be seen by anybody. I killed a little buck in the yard a few years ago with a Model 71 .348 so that one I didn't have to spend five hours on dragging uphill.

You Sir had a long, long walk to Jumping Branch! It's great to realize what a small world it is. All the best...Bill.

That's right my error