In the 19th century when Nahum and Serepta King and their children’s families lived on donation land claims in Kings Valley, occasional gatherings were just a part of life.
Older folks reminisced, younger adults talked about the news of the day and children played games — and they all shared a grand meal. In the decades that followed, the get-togethers evolved into organized family reunions.
This past weekend at Philomath City Park, descendants of the Kings Valley pioneer family renewed acquaintances at the 2024 version of the reunion. The number of participants has dwindled since the years when up to 200 folks would attend but that doesn’t minimize the importance of such events.
Just talk to Traci Willey, who is a great-great-great-great granddaughter of Nahum King, the pioneer who took out a land claim in what would become Kings Valley after traveling west in 1845 over the Oregon Trail. Willey calls herself an Oregon girl through and through and said her introduction to family history came through her grandmother, Maxine Greosser.
“My grandmother was very interested in genealogy because she lost her mother when she was very young,” Willey said Saturday at the reunion. “She passed that love on to me, she passed the information on to me, and she went to some of the earlier reunions, probably back in the ’70s.”
Willey, who has been the organization’s president since 2014, believes in the value and purpose of the family reunions and hopes to see them continue.
“The woman that had been doing it before had been doing it for quite some time and was ready to step down and so it was a now-or-never type of thing,” Willey said about taking over as president, a point in time when she was just starting grad school. “It’s actually been a kind of goal of mine. My life passion is to maintain this connection to this family and to Oregon and keep this going as long as I can.”
The reunion this past weekend turned out to be one of the smallest for the King descendants with less than two dozen showing up. Attendance through the years has ranged all the way up to 200.
“We’re struggling right now,” Willey said. “It’s hard to find people to help organize things. A lot of organizations are having this issue but that’s why I’ve been doing it for 10 years. I’m at the point where I’d like to step back but I don’t really want to step back because I don’t want this to die. I don’t want it to end with me.”
For a quick history lesson, Nahum and Serepta (Norton) King and several family members traveled overland to Oregon from St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1845.
“A number of the children were already married with families of their own so there was a group of about 25 people that came over the trail,” Willey said. “Of those, 20 survived — they lost the oldest son, his wife and two of his children with one of his children surviving. And then they lost a daughter in the Meek Cutoff.”
The Meek Cutoff branched off the main trail in northeastern Oregon and was first used in 1845 when the King family came through. In general, it followed the Malheur River from Vale, eventually reached the Crooked River and then split into paths that led to the Deschutes River and continued on to The Dalles. Several pioneers lost their lives along the route.
“The original family had 16 kids total and three did not survive childhood, one daughter did not move west … and another daughter did not come out in 1845 but came out later,” Willey said. “The rest of the family all came out over the wagon train.”
Willey believes the reunions have been held annually since the early 1900s with the only possible exception being in 2020 when it was canceled because of the pandemic. She said they originally started out as family picnics.
“Reunions have been held in various locations,” Willey said. “I believe they’ve been held at Adair Park in the past and we used to hold them at the charter school in Kings Valley. This is our second year at this location.”
Charlotte Wirfs recalls going to King reunions as a child in the 1950s in Avery Park in Corvallis.
“All I remember about those reunions is that there were a lot of people … and there was a bear, a great big dug-out den in the park,” said Wirfs, who brought several binders of family information along with photos and maps for the attendees to look through.
The bear pit at Avery Park that Wirf is referencing operated from 1947 to 1964.
A lot of the descendants from the original King family have remained in Oregon.
“From my DNA testing, I have 81 connections to Nahum King — that’s me and that’s not counting anybody else here,” said Willey, who lives in Beaverton. “Most of the people here are connected to spouses of descendants and that type of thing. There’s 10 children essentially that had offspring … and are still around in Oregon.”
Among those is David Trask, who lives in the Ashland area and serves as the board’s historian.
“It’s our heritage,” Trask said when asked why he believes in the importance of family reunions. “You know, our family endured amazing hardships across the Oregon Trail, so we’re very proud of the fact that it’s an era that we can’t appreciate today because we have cars and airplanes … Back in those days, it was a traumatic event to uproot” and move to a remote area such as Kings Valley.
Trask started to research the King family in the 1980s.
“That’s hardly 40 years ago but things were different then as far as doing research,” he said. “We did it by hand or by phone … we didn’t have the internet to help us out. So a lot of us still have put together a lot of bits and pieces by hand and are very proud of the fact that we have a lot of original documentation.”
Nathan King, who died in the 1980s, served as the historian prior to Trask and had been working on a book, which was never finished.
“I still maintain 10,000 pages of different things, including handwritten letters, certificates and family trees written by hand,” Trask said. “I don’t have everything, there’s others in the family that have more photos and so forth but we have so much information that’s genuine.”
His family line from Nahum King — his fourth great grandfather, goes to Isaac King to Alfred King to a daughter who married a Trask. Alfred King settled in southern Oregon, where Trask was born and raised.
Trask remembers when the reunions attracted many more people — many of those traveling great distances. He believes there are many reasons for the dwindling numbers but added that most attendees are simply older and those family members that had that connection have been lost through the years.
On top of that, he sees a disconnect between younger generations and their family’s past. Reunions used to attract entire families, including youngsters who would play games together, connect with relatives and perhaps learn about a great grandfather that resembled them in an old photograph.
Willey said the family maintains a newsletter that has transitioned to digital delivery.
“We really do try and keep in touch,” she said. “We have a Facebook page that is open to anybody affiliated with Kings Valley.”
The reunions aren’t restricted only to descendants of the original King family.
“I would say if you’re connected to Kings Valley, you’d be welcomed,” Willey said. “Anybody that’s interested in the history of Kings Valley we would be interested in connecting with them.”
There is also the KingFolk website, which gathers information about the family to make available to descendants.
Kings Valley resident Joe Fulton, who wrote a book entitled “Oregon’s Little Eden: A History of Kings Valley Through the Newspapers, 1855-1955,” was at the reunion signing copies for folks. His book includes several stories that connect to the King family, including the “mysterious death of Isaac King,” who is Willey’s great-great-great grandfather.
One final note on Nahum and Serepta King — several online sites incorrectly report Kings Valley Cemetery as their final resting place.
“They’re buried on their donation land claim, which we think is in Wren,” Willey said. “There’s only a memorial stone in the Kings Valley Cemetery for Nahum and Serepta. Because the children were spread out across Oregon and elsewhere, we put a memorial stone up in the cemetery with all of their names on it.”
