| Sources |
- [S25] Smith Mortuary Company, www.smithmortuary.com, 14 Apr 2011.
Margaret Naomi Whitehead Rhyne obituary
- [S27] The Daily Times, http://www.thedailytimes.com/, (Blount County, Tennessee), 4 Jun 2012.
Rhynes gather for reunion, marker dedication
By Melanie Tucker | (melt@thedailytimes.com)
With a couple of community dignitaries present, the Rhyne families from across the region gathered Sunday in Greenback for a fellowship reunion and to dedicate a stone monument to the first one of them to settle on Blount County soil.
Blount County Mayor Ed Mitchell and state Sen. Doug Overbey gave short talks at the 52nd annual East Tennessee Rhyne Reunion, an event that has been held on the first Sunday of June since it began in 1960. After lunch and a brief program, the Rhyne families met up at Williamson Chapel Cemetery about 10 miles away to unveil and dedicate a stone marker to Michael H. Rhyne Sr., who came to Blount County in the 1830s from Dallas, N.C. He settled into the southern part of Blount County near Loudon County, said Carolyn Meiller, a descendant and president of the East Tennessee Rhyne Reunion. He’s the first Rhyne known to have settled here, she said.
Meiller said when she became president of the reunion 16 years ago, she began thinking of ways to add some excitement into the annual event.
“Normally when you have a reunion, people will come in and bring food, eat, talk and that’s it,” she explained. “For many years, that’s the way it was. But I wanted to do something different. I wanted to have a program, add a little something to it. We needed a project.”
Meiller said there is a monument in northern Pennsylvania where the first Rhyne arrived in America, and there is a monument in North Carolina for the first Rhyne to arrive there. It only made sense, she said, to have a similar marker here.
The detective work
David and Barbara Mitchell and Meiller’s mother, Margaret Whitehead Rhyne, were the ones who dug deep into Rhyne family history to come up with some interesting tidbits about Michael H. Rhyne.
They found out things like he was known by the nickname “Constable Mike,” leaving them to guess he was in law enforcement, probably while still in North Carolina.
They also discovered that this first Rhyne settler in Blount was married twice and had a total of 20 children — 10 with each of them. His wives were Barbara Withers and Margaret Hoyle, who was his cousin.
He was born in Lincoln County, N.C. to Philip and Hannah Hoyle Rhyne on June 11, 1788. His family history is chronicled in the Rhyne Family of East Tennessee, written by Meiller’s mother.
Collecting that genealogy wasn’t easy, Meiller said. “There were trips to many states, libraries, the Library of Congress and lots of interviews with people.”
Years ago, Margaret Whitehead Rhyne found a prayer book that once belonged to Joseph York Rhyne, Meiller said. That book helped this Rhyne family establish their connection to the German Rhynes from Blankenloch, Germany. The family has been traced from there to York, Penn. to Dallas, N.C.
It took six years for the East Tennessee Rhynes to get the lineage traced and a monument created. On Sunday, it was unveiled under clear blue skies and with many appreciative glances. Meiller said it was great to see different family units taking photographs. She said they even had someone travel from Illinois for this special event.
Meiller attended the very first East Tennessee Rhyne Reunion back in 1960; she was just a senior in high school. The first one was organized by her mother and J. Wright Rhyne.
Now that the work on this huge project is complete, Meiller said she isn’t sure what the next focus will be for the family. They do plan to take a hiatus from having the annual gathering until 2015.
Other Rhyne reunions are held in Dallas, N.C., Colorado and Missouri, Meiller said it was estimated 15 years ago that there were 250,000 descendants from the first Rhyne to settle in America. “By now, that number should be 300,000,” she said.
Future generations will be able to look upon the beautiful marker installed in memory of Michael H. Rhyne and establish a connection to the past, Meiller said. There are also some of Michael’s children buried there at Williamson Chapel. Other family members can be found buried at Liberty Baptist Church.
There are Rhynes in all 50 states, Meiller said.
|
Search | Advanced Search
(Age 77 years)