I wrote this short story for inclusion in the 2025 annual anthology published by Ottawa Independent Writers. The anthology theme was ‘This World’ so the stories and poetry were all about the world where we all live – good or bad.
The bed looked so darn inviting! Yet after another thrilling day, and despite being exhausted, my wife and I were still wired. Sunday nights at home in June 2026 were usually quite sedate, given our lifestyle. However, today was day three of the most significant event in our lives: a multi-generational family reunion involving ten generations of ancestors and descendants.
We had read about my ancestors but never dreamed of having the occasion to meet so many of them, and we had never imagined the possibility of seeing the next four generations of our family. However, a year ago my three brothers, myself and our spouses decided to try some-thing totally different as a way of bringing family together. In the face of societal upheaval and major questions about the planet’s survival into the 22nd century, we decided it might be neat to address our future by gathering and learning from each other.
With 300 years of family from different parts of the world, one would think that we could celebrate and come to better appreciate our past, present and future. Surely there had been similar questions about the world’s future in the past. By bringing back those from the future, we could gain a sense of how the planet was doing in the future. Time travel is a wonderful invention!
The trick had been tracking everyone down. Fortunately, our efforts to build family trees had provided much of the information about our ancestors. We tested the recently introduced time travel system by sending a couple of us back in time with special handwritten invitations that spelled out the logistics and timing of the event to enable our ancestors to travel forward. We had been successful in tracking down and inviting ancestors that included our great-great-great grandparents, both maternal and paternal.
Inviting those from the future had been an easier task as each of the generations going forward possessed the information about the next generation. Furthermore, the technological expectations were not as demanding for those living in a new world. Our descendants included those up to our great-great grandchildren. For us in the moment, this dive into the future though had been full of surprises and we found our lives changing as we discovered more about our legacies, even before they had been lived. The end result was a family reunion with almost 200 family members gathered here in June 2026 in Kingston, Ontario.
Day one was about meeting each other while facing the shock of seeing so many who travelled from all over the planet. Greeting every family member was accompanied by oohs and aahs, lots of laughter and tears, and much bewilderment. Almost everyone carried their special edition of our family tree providing an outline of the generations and a description of each person relative to everyone else, along with photos wherever possible.
I had hugged my great-great-great grandfathers William Thwaites, born in England in 1790, and Richard Beamish, born in Ireland in 1773, and there were tears in our eyes as I held my great-great grandchild, William Lamothe, born in Peru in 2090 and now five years of age. We experienced some difficulty understanding each other’s accents, but the joy on our faces communicated the wonder we all felt.
My grandfather Gordon Beamish (1903)3 and I laughed as we compared this reunion to the annual Beamish Family Reunions back in the 1960s and 1970s which had brought his brothers, sisters and three generations together. That was considered a huge accomplishment back then. Being here now with a sparkle in his eyes, he kept saying to me, ‘Amazing, George! This just blows my mind.’
Meanwhile, across the room, my father, mother and stepfather spent time connecting with their many generations of descendants before turning their attention to their ancestors. In another corner of the room, my grandmothers connected with their mothers and grandmothers. And through it all, the youngest generations were mixing it up with all their new-found relatives. It was pure chaos!
Day One’s activities were largely informal. We had provided some structure to minimize the potential for overwhelming each family member and to break down barriers that were likely to exist between so many generations and different branches of the family. However, it did not take long for natural mixing to replace structured intervention. We set up a banquet in the evening that brought folks together along family lines throughout the generations. The noise was almost overwhelming with
cries of recognition and laughter as people introduced themselves. Thankfully, photo taking was facilitated by artificial intelligence tools the future generations had snuck back.
Day Two was more formalized around the second purpose of the event; learning from each other how the planet we all shared evolved over 300 years. In the morning, we started with speeches by a number of family members. The room was silent and people were in awe as Richard and Eliza Beamish (1773 and 1783), William Thwaites (1790), William and Caroline King (1817 and 1821), and Charles and Mary Beamish (1820 and 1831) spoke of life in 19th century England and Ireland. Life had certainly been different before and during the Industrial Revolution, along with the growing wave of emigration to Africa, Australia and North America as families spread their wings.
They were followed by my grandmothers: Clara King Thwaites (1886) and Quinn Johnston Beamish (1900), and by my father, George H. Thwaites (1920). They recounted their lives throughout the 1900s, what they had seen and experienced through world wars, economic depressions and natural disasters, the introduction of the automobile and air travel, and man’s landing on the moon in 1969. Nobody made mention of the yet-to-be-developed internet.
Through lunch and into the early afternoon, virtual story rooms had been created where each person was transported through time and various scenarios, as if in a living historical museum. The visuals showed the physical state of the planet, celebrating the beauty and splendour of the world, while underlining how over time, the knowledge and understanding of our planet had changed and it had become a smaller place. The speakers told the stories of their daily lives, from descriptions of housing, roads, infrastructure, travel, heating and waste management, to family interactions and societal norms and practices.
A simple example was the heating of homes in 1830 by peat or coal and what that had meant in terms of air quality and health conditions. The comparison was to the pervasive existence of heating in 2060 by highly sophisticated heat pumps and nuclear, solar and naturally generated energy with near-zero adverse implications for the environment. What a transformation!
Interwoven through the presentations was the story of our family, speaking to the human factor as the world changed, but more importantly to how each of us has been or is part of something so much bigger and complex. The faces of grandparents changed vividly as they realized their legacy down through the generations. And amongst the newest in the lineage, there was a new-found respect and understanding of what their forebears had lived through as they and the planet changed.
In the afternoon, presentations were made by those from the present and future generations. They spoke of how technology was changing everything so rapidly, the challenges of standing up to despotic and fear-mongering political leaders, the misinformation and abuse of social media, and how societal and environmental changes were occurring at such speed that every day was defined by new challenges.
There was wonder as those born after 2050 reported on the complete absence of fossil fuels in day-to-day transportation systems and home heating, the new-found electric infrastructure around the world, the ban on plastic throughout Europe and North America, the complete restructuring of the United Nations including its security council without veto rights, the creation of a new world wide ‘climate council’ with powers to intercede and punish nations, and how climatic disasters had contributed to a recasting of geographic, political and economic power structures.
The evening of Day Two was much less formal. By then, everyone was exhausted from the time travel, events, information overload and the emotions of being together in a strange setting. We provided a setting for relaxation and for everyone simply to enjoy being with each other and have the chance for more in-depth connections. There was fatigue on the faces of nearly everyone, but for those living in the present world, there was not only a better sense of the past, but of the obligation for immediate and significant interventions if future generations were going to have a world to live in. For those who were here 200 years ago, there was shock at how the world had changed with much of it beyond comprehension, and of how information and education were so widely available.
Today was Day Three and it provided a break with no formal activity in the morning. Many attended various services at local Kingston churches; others had taken walks along the lake; others hopped on boat cruises allowing them to relax and sightsee away from the hub-bub of a hundred or so kin.
There were two components to the afternoon reunion. The first was a session where the stories from Saturday were shared in an integrated manner. The theme was how the challenges of yesterday, today and tomorrow were in many ways understood to be similar, yet the context was so completely different. Our planet, on which we each lived, had been at various tipping points and yet survived through the ingenuity of the people of the time, the dedication to learning and innovation, the increased realization of the importance of environmental stewardship and a commitment to live and be better.
The second session was a fun time where the two youngest generations put on plays, told short stories and sang songs about their impressions of our family and our planet. Laughter and admiration for their skills filled the room. The light-hearted time was welcomed by all.
Sunday dinner was jointly hosted by Alexander Donald (1825) and Frances Thwaites (2065). It had been their job to bring the overall messages together into a common family story. They did a masterful and brilliant job of weaving our story to emphasize our commonalities over time, the resiliency of ourselves and the planet, and the importance of faith, the human factor and environmental stewardship. As a backdrop to their speeches, they used music from across the generations that emphasized and celebrated hope. I found reassurance in the lyrics of one song: ‘I’m not okay but it’s all gonna be alright.’
Tomorrow would see the end of the family reunion and a return to the past, present or future. It had been a wonderful three days, but our planet was changing and we would never be the same. Thank goodness for family.