Please note this site is now implementing more rigorous security settings through a Secure Sockets Layer certificate. The correct way to access the site is by entering https://www.bunkerfamilyassn.org in your browser.

If you use the old http: entry, you will be re-directed to the proper, and secure site.

An application form for this year’s Annabelle Moore Scholarship awarded by the Bunker Family Association may be downloaded here:

Download application [PDF]

The scholarship is awarded to a child or grandchild of a BFA member in good standing. Applicants must be high school seniors or college freshmen. Do
not miss the May 1 deadline.

Mary Bunker Peterson, Graveyard Committee Chair, visited the Durham site of the Bunker Graveyard this week, and found some damage.  In an e-mail, she said:

“I think this was storm damage. I don’t see evidence of vandalism. In fact, someone was kind enough to prop the gate up against the granite post.

“I think it’s possible that in one case a very large limb came down and broke the fence. That’s why I took a picture of the limb lying on the side. At the other end of the graveyard, the fencing is pulling out because the granite post in the corner continue to lean more and more as the ground shifts. You can also see this in the picture of that section.

“The only possible ‘vandalism’ I saw was that a chunk of the granite post by the big limb is missing. It seems to have been almost square and perhaps someone took it. At least I couldn’t find it and I looked all around the area. So that post cannot be repaired with the missing piece, but maybe some other way.”

Congratulations to Natalie Snyder as this 2015 Annabelle Moore Scholarship Recipient

Natalie will attend Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO and plans to study neuroscience with the goal of providing care in support and relief from debilitating neural disorders.

She attended Lakewood High School, Lakewood, CO where she was a Girl Scout, tutor and participated in seven years of science fairs.

Previous honors include a Colorado Merit Scholarship, President’s Academic Award and Academic High Honors from Lakewood High as well as several awards in Girl Scouts.

Good luck to Natalie! We know your grandmother JoAnn Stearns Snyder (past BFA Treasurer), is proud of you, as are we!

LiAnn Pennington
Scholarship Chair

Brian Anthony Bunker was born in Wandsworth, London, England, on 5 April 1936, the only child of Albert R. G. Bunker and Harriett Brooks. He passed away 21 June 2015. From 1960 to 1995, Brian taught history and English at Carshalton Boys School, Surrey, England.

For many years, Brian served as the British Historian of the Bunker Family Association genealogical research team. BFA Vice President and USA Family Historian Bette Bunker Richard commented, “He left a valuable legacy to the Bunker Family Association and it will be years before we finish inputting all the data he provided.” Bette’s comments appear in the August 2015 edition of the Bunker Banner:

Brian’s father was a butcher and when asked about military service of his father and grandfather, Brian A. Bunker replied, “Father was double ruptured so was excused service in W.W.I, joined the Home Guard in the second. George eldest child of Harriet Brandon, having lost a few years, went into WW I on 29 7 1915 but was discharged as ‘unlikely to make an efficient soldier’ on the 20 8 1915. I expect some of the rest did but as you know, Uncle Adolph destroyed most records during WW II. Father told me that when in a cinema in 1914-18, the film would be stopped for the military to check males and when he showed his excused card the sergeant major would often throw it on the floor and spit on it. I myself was called up for national service and spent three weeks waiting for a medical discharge.”

As to his memories of growing up in London during World War II, Brian said, “I lived in Kingston on Thames, Surrey, England all through the war except when evacuated to Devon in 1940/41 and 1944. Of course we knew that people were being killed for where there was a house yesterday there was the next day a pile of rubble. Many years later I obtained the number of civilians killed in
Kingston, during the war and it turned out to be almost 100 and Kingston was not a badly bombed area! One of those killed was a cousin of mine in the Hawker factory which made Hurricane fighters. His mother buried an empty coffin for not a single identifiable bit of him was ever found, it was reckoned the bomb fell directly on top of him and simply blew him to pieces. We children loved the war, it was so exciting to see German bombers coming down in a great plume of flame and smoke, we didn’t think of our lads being killed. The British losses were always officially halved while the German ones were doubled. We boys, all were convinced that Uncle Adolph would never get us and though there were plenty of empty desks in my classroom, it was due to evacuation not to anybody being killed, mind you the school lost all of its roof in 1944, blown off like a knife going through the top of a cake.”

Brian adamantly opposed all wars and sending mere boys off to be slaughtered or returned forever scarred by their experience. He frequently expressed his views on this matter. He cherished the boys he had taught for so many years but he had delightful comments about some of their antics. Brian had a droll sense of humor and it was a delight to work with him. His comments about British politicians spiced up many conversations and he will be so missed by all of us. Brian never married and left no children.

The Annabelle Moore Scholarship Award is a $500 grant given to a child or grandchild of a Bunker Family Association member in good standing. The recipient will be a high school graduating senior or college freshman.

The scholarship is awarded on the following basis: (1) Scholarship attainment, (2) Goals and worthiness, (3) Financial need, (4) Activities and awards.

The applicant shall complete (a.) the current application form, (b.) a genealogy chart showing Bunker lineage and forward (c.) a complete high school transcript (with official HS seal) containing marks for the most recent term or semester. The three forms must be submitted by the deadline indicated and forwarded to:

LiAnn Pennington
2632 52nd Avenue
Greeley, CO 80634-4005

For questions or other information: lianngrannyp@gmail.com

Download nomination form [PDF]

The 169th edition of the Bunker Family Association’s regular newsletter is at the printers for postal delivery, and members who have opted for electronic delivery have been sent the PDF version directly or via shared links. The lead story this month is quite interesting–a dispatch of handwritten letters from Matthew Bunker (a Nantucket Bunker) to his parents in Brooklyn, New York in 1853.  Matthew sent the letters from Australia, where he was traveling to the gold fields and forming the Bunker Freeland & Co. partnership for selling goods to the miners.

And another interesting tidbit: the future replacement of the Charlestown (High) Bridge across the Charles River in Boston. BFA President Gil Bunker notes that, except by Charlestown residents who call it the Charlestown and/or High Bridge, the bridge is commonly known as the Zakim Bridge after civil rights activist Leonard P. Zakim, though when the current structure was built in the 1950s it was to be known as the Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge (its two suspension tower peaks replicate the Bunker Hill Monument.

Also Gil comments about the restoration of the BFA’s tax exempt status, and Mary Bunker Peterson sent in photos of the Bunker Garrison graveyard restoration work performed in September.

Also, please note that, unless you have paid your BFA dues recently, the November Banner may be the last paper copy you receive, as the membership list will be reviewed and those substantially in arrears are subject to being dropped from the membership rolls. Dues may be paid to the BFA and mailed to Treasurer Lowell Bunker (see membership or contacts pages for mailing address).

Thanks to the diligent efforts of BFA President Gil Bunker, the Internal Revenue Service has reinstated the tax-exempt status of the Bunker Family Association. The reinstatement is retroactive to November 15, 2011, when tax-exempt status lapsed.

Various documents have been refiled, and the BFA continues to qualify for tax-exempt contributions.

The following is the annual report from the web master given at the BFA Reunion earlier this month:

This is an annual report on the Bunker Family Association’s web site and e-mail activities. Prior family commitments and my business commitments prevent attendance at this year’s reunion. Our e-mail group at Rootsweb.com remains active with more than 160 subscribers—about the same as last year’s total. Not all of these are members of the BFA. Anyone wishing to subscribe to the list may send an e-mail request to BUNKER-L-request@rootsweb.com with the word “subscribe” in the subject line. Alternatively, some folks prefer to allow the list manager (that’s me) to manually subscribe them. You can send me at an e-mail request at doug.detling@gmail.com and I’ll add you. This past year has been a particular challenge, as many long-time subscribers have been removed due to spam filters (interpreting our list messages as spam) at many large e-mail providers such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Comcast, forcing a lot of many re-subscription work. I believe this will continue to be a problem, and I am exploring some alternatives for Association members but this has the downside of limiting outreach to those interested in genealogy (Rootsweb is the largest provider of e-mail groups for those doing surname genealogy research).

The BFA web site at https://www.bunkerfamilyassn.org is hosted at a large commercial hosting company. The annual cost of maintaining the site has been $110, including the domain name registry and no web data traffic charges, though costs may go up later this year due to a possible switch in providers. The current provider (1and1.com) is not particularly responsive to long-time customers (such as the BFA) and during the last year we have had several outages for hours at a time on the web site. I am exploring alternatives but we may not be able to maintain the current budget level (which has been stable for several years). I don’t expect the cost to be more than $125, however.

Electronic distribution of the Bunker Banner (begun last year) has grown slightly but has not yet reached the level that BFA mailing expenses are significantly reduced. Part of the reason, I think, is that we haven’t hit on the perfect method of making these files available (large attachments are blocked by some e-mail mail providers so we are using shared document links). I will be happy to work with any member who wants to get files electronically via e-mail distribution or shared links.

Photographs of interest to BFA members continue to be accessible through the webmaster’s photo site at http://greencity.phanfare.com. I pay an annual fee for this site, but sharing a few photo albums with BFA members can be just considered a contribution to behalf of the BFA (in other words, no BFA funds are involved in this) and I will happily post photos from the reunion there.
Another activity of the web master is the production of the CDs and USB thumb drives that Bette Bunker Richards has created on the Bedford and Devon Bunker families. When current CD versions are sold, we will only be distributing these files on USB thumb drives. While USB drives are more expensive, production time is significantly shorter per copy (about 2 minutes per thumb drive compared to 20-30 minutes per CD), and the master files are easier to update as Adobe alters PDF reader requirements. Also, many newer computers don’t have CD readers.

I continue to work on scanning back issues of the Bunker Banner for distribution on thumb drives and expect to complete that by fall (more than half-way there). This work has been more time consuming that I expected, also limiting me from progressing on a new version that extends and corrects some of the work on the Devon Bunkers CD on my own line (descendants of Sobriety Bunker).

As always, any suggestions may be sent to me via e-mail (doug.detling@gmail.com)

Three portraits of Bunker Nantucket ancestors are scheduled for auction this weekend.

The auction will be in Ashville, North Carolina on Saturday, March 15 toward the end of this session (Session 2 on March 16) and include three portraits of Nantucket ancestors. N-205 Alexander Downs Bunker (listed as Alexander Davis), his wife Rebecca and his younger brother N-128-II Absalom. The auction includes journals and history kept by Captain Alexander when he was the Nantucket lighthouse keeper, after he retired from whaling.

The complete 114 pp. catalogue is free at the door or available on line www.brunkauctions.com

Absentee or phone bidding is available – all bids must start no lower than ½ the suggested lowest price.

Brunk Auctions phone number 828-254-6846 or  info@brunkauctions.com.

Download the Bunker Ancestors portraits [PDF]