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REIDSVILLE — It’s been more than a decade since Dani Matthews Roach, 66, uprooted her family ties to Rockingham County and transplanted them in Tiburon, Calif., where she and her husband, Bob, now live.

In retirement, they wanted to be near their adult children and grandchildren.

But those Rockingham roots weren’t severed. Roach still felt the pull to places like Eden, where she grew up, and Reidsville, where she lived most of her adult life.

Six months ago, she got a subscription to ancestry.com, an online genealogy site, and started making that trip back in time, putting together the puzzle pieces of the past.

“I was obsessed,” she says of the hours she logged poring over old maps and census records, often staying up until 2 a.m., savoring those “eureka” moments when she scratched a little deeper into the family lineage.

It wasn’t enough.

So she began organizing a gathering of her clan.

Roach bird-dogged far-flung cousins, even going so far as cold-calling some she’d never met.

On Oct. 14, Roach came home to Eden and Reidsville to reminisce and mingle with cousins and a sister, most who were a big part of her childhood, and one who wasn’t, a distant cousin whom she’d never met.

There were seven of them: Roach; her sister, Jeannie Matthews Roach; her cousins Nancy Fulcher Trollinger, Edmund Pickup, Patricia Pickup Faires and Lynda Pickup Whitehead; and a second cousin, John Disibbio, the one she didn’t know. Traveling from various areas of North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, they met in Eden over a weekend.

All but Disibbio were the grandchildren of Andrew Jackson Matthews and Minnie Lee Manley Matthews, who raised their four children (a fifth died) in a mill house on Overlook Avenue in Eden. Disibbio is Minnie Matthews’ great-nephew.

Roach had old photos and histories to share — she even shook two Confederate soldiers out of the family tree. But she’s really drawn to those stories that were never recorded in the family Bibles.

Like the great uncle who procured a train conductor’s uniform, wearing it whenever he traveled so that he could ride for free. He also was rumored to be a polygamist.

And then there was Minnie Matthews — Ma Ma to the grandchildren.

“Ma Ma was everyone’s favorite grandmother,” says Roach.

She helped her grandchildren make pretend snuff so that they could partake with her. Although her snuff was a smokeless tobacco, theirs was a mixture of cocoa and sugar, dipped with a well-chewed twig from a black gum tree.

Ma Ma also was known to invite her maid, Bert, to join her for a nip in the pantry every afternoon.

“I think that’s why Bert worked for her for so long,” says Roach.

Ma Ma’s husband, Daddy Jack, as he was known to his grandchildren, was a teetotaler and didn’t abide liquor in his house, even for medicinal purposes. The pantry forays were a family secret.

Daddy Jack, a foreman in the textile mill, spent his Sunday mornings, usually his only day off, singing in the choir at Leaksville United Methodist Church. Sunday afternoons were spent winding his clocks — more than 100 of them. Back then, the grandchildren were convinced that anyone with that many clocks had to be rich, so they searched the house for a hidden safe. The cousins finally decided it had to be in the wall behind the heavy oak wardrobe, the one piece of furniture they couldn’t budge.

They each have one of their grandfather’s clocks now — keepsakes that bring back thoughts of that old mill house.

It’s not surprising that they ended up there, and since it’s vacant now, they were able to go inside. One last time, they looked for signs of a safe, but the spot where the wardrobe once stood hid nothing.

While there, several of them had their photo taken in a spot near the porch where a childhood photo was once snapped with Daddy Jack.

They spent some of the weekend dropping in on old hangouts like Dick’s Drive-In. They drank sweet tea and ate fried chicken, and they made their way to family grave sites, leaving a rose at each stone marker.

After making the rounds in Eden, the cousins went to Reidsville, taking their genealogy quest back another generation to their grandmother’s parents, John Wesley Manley and his wife, Missouri Elizabeth Henderson Manley. He was the superintendent of Edna Mill in Reidsville, and the family lived on Edna Street. The home is still there.

A family story recalls that Missouri so hated her name, she refused to name her children. She called them “Boy” or “Girl” until they were old enough to select their own names.

Perhaps that’s why Minnie Matthews (Ma Ma) once posed for a photo in front of a cemetery tomb with the name “Boyd” on it. She positioned her head to block the letter “D” on the stone, making it appear to read “Boy.” The cousins, using the photo for reference, found that very tombstone where she posed in 1936 — the same year her mother-in-law died and was laid to rest nearby in Greenview Cemetery.

But as much as the weekend was about the past, it was also about the present.

It was about reconnecting.

“This gave me new beginnings, new memories, a new way to love them (the cousins),” Roach says. And it’s given her the inspiration to keep plowing through the past.

She has found another cousin in Oklahoma and a distant cousin in South Carolina. That means another reunion, perhaps next fall.

And she’s still looking. Anyone with information about the Manley or Matthews families can email her at dandiart@comcast.net. She’s especially interested in finding descendants of T. Edward Manley and Robert Manley of Reidsville.

Contact Myla Barnhardt at 627-4881, Ext. 116, or myla.barnhardt@news-record.com.