Official Newsletter of the Ward Family Association
Vol. 8, No. 7 ................................................................................................. July, 2004
Ward Family News Now Online
Welcome to the online version of the Ward Family News -- official family newsletter of the Ward Family Association, a national family club for all descendants of the Ward families. The purpose of the Ward newsletter is to help keep Ward relatives all over America informed of what is happening with their kinfolk. This is like our own family newspaper.
Your Ward family newsletter will contain current news, obituaries, engagements, weddings, births, articles on family history and more of Wards.
WE NEED YOUR HELP: when you hear of a death, marriage, engagement, birth or other news about a Ward relative, please let us know the full details. If you see a Ward obituary, wedding or engagement notice or other news in your local newspaper, clip it out, along with the name and date of the paper from the top of the page and mail it to us to preserve in the Family Library and to print in the family newsletters. Hope you will enjoy your family newsletters and come back often to keep up with your kinfolk.
REMEMBER...if you don't see an obituary, marriage, birth or other family news in YOUR family newsletter, it is because you forgot to let us know. The only way we can get news about our kinfolk is if you help by sending it in.
If you are a Ward or descendant of a Ward, whose family roots are in the South, you are urged to join and support the Ward Family Association. Visit the Family club's HOME page to learn more about what we are all about. You can also jump from the Home page to the Ward Family HISTORY section, the Ward Family QUERIES section, the FAMOUS WARDS section and our other pages. Click on Back to HOME at the bottom of this page to get started.
NEWS ALEXANDER CITY, Ala.-- John F. ("Jack") Ward has been named president and chief operating officer of the Russell Corporation, an international athletic wear manufacturer headquartered here.
Jack retired as vice president of Sara Lee in August, 1996 and then became president of the J. F. Ward Group, an apparel and textile consulting firm in Winston-Salem, NC. He had previously been chief executive of the Hanes Group. He also serves on the board of directors of Burlington Industries and Piedmont Venture Partners. John was enticed out of "retirement" to help Russell boost sagging sales, which fell 7.7 percent to $333.5 million for the last quarter.
"One of the things we will be working on is increasing market awareness," Jack told a newspaper.
Russell is one of the world's leading manufacturers of athletic sports wear, producing jackets, caps, sweaters, knit shirts, socks and a line of light-weight, yarn-dyed woven fabrics. They produce licensed sports apparell for many professional football, baseball, basketball and other sports teams as well as for many colleges. The company has completed a $35 million major manufacturing center in Columbus, Ga. which employed about 525. Russell has announced this brand-new pland and several others will be closed. Jack has also decided to move the company's headquarters out of Alexander City and relocate it to Atlanta. [EDITOR'S NOTE: doesn't seem very "economical" to shut down plants and put thousands of folks out of jobs and then relocate a headquarters from a low-cost small town to a big city, where labor and all other costs are much higher. But of course, the skyscraper views in Atlanta are much better than a small town's.]
If your branch of the family is planning a reunion--let us know so we can write a story about it in the family newsletter. Please send complete details, with the dates, time, place (and directions how to get there if it is in a rural area, etc.), person to contact, with telephone number, mailing address and, if available, email address so kinfolk can contact you for additional information about your reunion.
If this is an annual affair, tell us some history: when and where did it begin and how (in honor of some ancestor's birthday, etc.); if you have a reunion committee, list the names and hometowns of the officers.
AFTER the reunion, write and tell us all about it so we can have another story. Include how many attended, who traveled the greatest distance, what states and towns were represented. Give the names and hometowns of the oldest and youngest attendees; your activities (history programs, entertainment); if you have a reunion committee, list the new officers elected and any other facts about the gathering you can include.
A Ward family reunion will be held for descendants of the family in Henderson County, North Carolina 22 June. We meet each fourth Sunday in June at 1:00 PM. Our clan has been in that area since the early 1800's. Johnathon, James Blake, Phillip Thomas and James Levi Ward were all residents of Henderson County. For the last two years, the meeting has taken place on the farm purchased by James in 1912. For more info, contact J. Ward (click on the highlighted name below).
J. Ward
BACK to Ward Family Club HOME page