Manuel A. Arrington, my little brother, Mony as he is more affectionately known, underwent emergency gall bladder surgery Thursday August 13, 2009. By the grace of God he went to the hospital when he did as his condition was very serious. The surgery went well and he is resting comfortably now at Carroll Hospital Center in Westminster, MD. He is in room 305 b in the west wing. The main number to the hospital is 410-848-3000. We ask for your prayers for his swift and complete recovery.

As you know Manuel is the driving force behind this web site and a primary component of the rebirth of familial ties in this family. Myself, I have to admit, I know few of you. As a young child I spent many summer weekends and a couple of extended vacations on my Granddad’s farm but I spent them alone or with my cousins from Pittsburgh who were there for the summer too. The distances between farms, the farm work schedules of the adults, our own chores and even the more solitary attitudes of our then senior family members precluded many of us from ever really meeting and or getting to know each other. In 1967 at the age of 9, I attended the family reunion I beleive was held at Aunt Nellie’s where I was not much more than John Henry’s boy or John Henry’s grandson to many because I was not part of the local family structure. My strongest memory of that reunion is the hay wagon we used for a serving table, shucking corn for the old big black kettle with a bunch of other kids and a man who got drunk. Sorry but we never had any others and quite frankly I didn’t know many of the people there.  After my grandfather, John Henry Arrington Sr. died in 1968 and my grandmother Mattie in 1969, I had few really “known” ties to Virginia and the rest of the Arrington family as I had not been raised around a lot of them. We lived in the DC area just far enough from the country that it was not a quick trip and most if not all of the family as far as I knew didn’t travel. I mean in my whole life the only person to ever come up from Virginia to see us was my Uncle Robert so my ties to the Arrington name were further reduced in 1984 by his death. Since my Aunt Mary lived in Pittsburgh and I had never been really close to any other members of the Arrington clan I stopped going to Virgina. With the demands of farm life and my distance from Virginia this effectively ended my involvement with my father’s family. In fact prior to 2008 the last time I was even near Brightwood or Madison was 1977 a few years before my uncle passed I drove down from college in Baltimore for a Memorial Day holiday weekend. When my Uncle passed in 1984 I did not attend because of work and family obligations that I couldn’t avoid. To be honest with you in the 40 years since my grandfather’s death and prior to my father’s passing in 2008, I have seen so few of you that I can count you on one hand. As I finished growing up I did not see much of the Arrington family beyond my own siblings, my cousins in Pittsburgh and a couple of cousins in DC that I was not very close to. These few people represented all of my father’s family to me. Once I was grown and even later after I had my own family, I never sought out any of you and you never sought me out either. Heck, I never even knew many of you existed such as the Ohio branch of the family.  How many more of us have similar stories or have experienced similar disconnection from our families? How many of us know we have hundreds of cousins and that our family stretches all across the US? Between 2003 and 2006 I lived in Detroit not all that far from one of my cousins and never got to see her or her family. I also traveled to Ohio time and time again especially Columbus and never knew I had family there. One of my primary equipment suppliers at one point was in Columbus and I came down from Detroit almost once a month! I have traveled from LA to DC, from Manchester to Miami and from Detroit to Dallas. I have lived across the US and could have met and greeted so many along the way. This time and opportunity is lost but I will not allow others to get past me as I travel quite regularly.

In the last decade of my father’s life especially, he revisited and reconnected with many people in this family but by then I was traveling and working across the US and not really close enough to share that reconnection with him. That fell to Manuel. It was Manuel who helped him travel or transported him to events along with my older brother John Henry III. Due to even then, a lack of communication at least a few times when I could have participated I did not and often simply because I didn’t know. When my father passed last year in September I saw more people called family for me in one place than I had since 1967. In fact I briefly got the joy of meeting a few of you and some of the older ones remembered the little chubby boy that I had been so many years ago but many more had no idea who I was at all.

The Internet has caused a dramatic change though in this world and unlike many years ago, now through the efforts of Manuel, when people graduate or perform or have any other major event in their lives people know about it if he knows. Distances are irrelevant, as well as so many other things, as the Internet puts all that aside and let’s us share almost anything. Back in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s there were no easy open lines of communication and no easy means to inform mass numbers of people of the events of the day. No single person knew of the multitude of births, deaths, birthdays, graduations, performances, awards or a  host of other events that went on in our family and many things that many of us could have traveled to if we had known and planned were relegated to only the local members of the family. We were separated by not only great distances, obligations and even lifestyles but by a lack of information. As a family member that grew up not knowing many of you and seeing even less of the few I did, I want to thank my little brother for all his hard work and dedication to this effort. This web site is the means for us to share the important or even silly things in our lives. It is a tool that we need to take full advantage of and as the motto of the web site says use in:

“Building bridges between branches of the Arrington Family”

To all those of us who call ourselves “Family” I issue a challenge to assist Manuel with helping to reconnect us. We are family and in that we share a bond of blood that can not be broken. It is time we took family seriously. For the sake of our children and our own posterity we are the only family we will ever have and in family as in other types of networks there is both support and strength. It does not matter if your last name is Arrington, or that you have married into this family. Your children have the blood line and in that we have a foundation that runs back now many generations. Too many of us do not know our heritage or from whence we came so we need to pass on the family history and experience while we can. We need to create a directory of our family and all the people and relationships in it. Please send the names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, and occupations of any known family members to marrngtn@arrington.org or you can email me at joel.arrington@minister.com. More importantly we need to know how we are related, so make sure you include as much family history as you can. My Pop knew a lot but he is gone so if we wish to maintain this information it is time now for us to gather it before it dies with the oldest generation of Arringtons. Once assembled I plan to publish a family directory and create a family tree, so if you’d rather not be included in the directory but wouldn’t mind us knowing your information please just let me know and I will only use your name in the directory and relationships in the tree. Let’s get this started and make plans for a new family reunion before we loose more of our seniors. Time stands still for no one.

Once again I ask for your prayers for my brother’s speedy and complete recovery.