Ranger Grandkids Sought For Reunion
By Deborah Fitts

ATOKA, Va. — In a first-ever event of its kind in modern times, a nonprofit organization named for Confederate partisan fighter John S. Mosby will hold a reunion for grandsons and granddaughters of Mosby’s rangers in June.

The June 10 event is being sponsored by the Mosby Heritage Area Association (MHAA), which works to promote and preserve the large portion of Northern Virginia countryside that came to be known as Mosby’s Confederacy.

As of mid-April, only “three or four” actual grandchildren of rangers have been identified, acknowledged Judy Reynolds, the association’s executive director. But she says the group will “start slow” this year and then expand the event to all descendants, plus the public, in 2009.

The reunion, closed to the public, will be held at historic Green Garden Farm near Upperville. Green Garden was the home of Mosby ranger Dolly Richards, who along with two of his ranger colleagues hid in a closet crawl space of the house one day in February 1865 when Federal troopers came by during a sweep for Mosby men.

The association will create decorative buttons for the participants, like those used for earlier Mosby reunions. MHAA’s drama troupe, the Gray Ghost Interpretive Group, will present a skit featuring the Dolly Richards escape. There will be a picnic supper on the lawn and period music.

Reynolds said the event was prompted by one of association’s own volunteers who is a ranger granddaughter herself. Her father, a ranger son, is still living, in his 90s.

A goal of the event, said Reynolds, is to collect as much ranger material as possible from the descendants. MHAA will ask to copy documents and tape family stories in order to start a research archive that they hope will grow.

According to Reynolds, there were about 1,900 partisan rangers who served at one time or another under Mosby.

She is asking any descendants of Mosby’s men to contact MHAA at (540) 687-6681, or e-mail her at info@mosbyheritagearea.org. She predicted that the ranger reunion will become an annual event.