About two centuries separate Joan Geers from Daniel Miner, her great-great-great grandfather and her last ancestor to carry the Miner name.

But that connection was strong enough to draw the Oklahoma woman to Pittsburgh this weekend for the annual reunion of the Minerd-Minard-Miner-Minor clan, which claims as many as 50,000 members across the county and has its roots in Western Pennsylvania.

"It's been a long time since we left," said Mrs. Geers, 55, a commercial real estate agent and amateur genealogist who lives in a suburb of Oklahoma City.

Her great-grandmother, Laura Barnum (the granddaughter of Daniel Miner) was a participant in the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush.

Mrs. Geers, her three sisters and her parents are making their first trip to Pittsburgh, and yesterday they joined a crowd of about 100 of their very distant cousins at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center in the Strip District.

"Most of the folks are absolutely perfect strangers," said Mark Miner, a Beaver man who is the event's primary organizer and the driving force behind www.minerd.com. "But we're trying to bring together people who have a common thread of DNA."

Mr. Miner, 47, the president of a small public relations firm, first started exploring his extended family tree as a teenager, when a great aunt gave him a photo album containing portraits of relatives, dating back to the 1800s. She asked him to learn about their backgrounds.

He fulfilled her request, and he didn't stop there, going on to create his Web site. It now features about 1,100 biographies of family members. He spends most of his free time compiling information for the site, which has received recognition from Family Tree Magazine as one of the top family genealogy Web sites in the country.

Every summer, Mr. Miner travels with a distant cousin from New Jersey to archives, libraries and county courthouses throughout the Midwest to learn about the descendents of Jacob Minerd and Maria Nein.

Mr. Minerd, a Revolutionary War veteran and the son of German immigrants, settled in 1791 near Mill Run, Fayette County.

According to Mark Miner, the couple had 12 children, roughly 87 grandchildren, 469 great-grandchildren and 1,344 great-great grandchildren -- all before the 20th century.

The Minerd-Minard-Miner-Minor name variations come from inconsistent spellings used in written documents from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Mr. Miner estimates that the baby boomer generation helped swell his family's numbers into the 40,000 to 50,000 range. His goal is to collect about 2,000 biographies that detail the lives of the earliest family members.

Anyone interested in discovering a possible connection to his extended family can put their last name and the Minerd Web site address into a Google search.

Yesterday's reunion included a tribute to Army Capt. Erick Foster, the only member of the extended family to die in the Iraq War. Capt. Foster, 29, a paratrooper from Franklin Park, suffered fatal injuries when insurgents attacked his unit in Muqdadiyah, Iraq, inAugust.

Mr. Miner once lived in a house on the same block as Capt. Foster's Franklin Park home. He didn't uncover the family connection until he interviewed the captain's great aunt in Normalville, Fayette County.

Mr. Miner unveiled a photo portrait of Capt. Foster yesterday, and reunion attendees gave a standing ovation.

At least 28 members of the extended family have died in America's armed conflicts, including the Civil War, both World Wars and Vietnam.

The reunions are usually held in Fayette and Somerset counties, but Mr. Miner decided to hold this year's event in Pittsburgh to connect it to the city's 250th anniversary.

Corwin Tilbury, a distant relative who served on Pittsburgh City Council in 1908, was an organizer for the city's 150th anniversary celebration.

"Pittsburghers have some kind of chip implanted in them, a homing device that brings them back eventually," Andrew Masich, the history center's president and chief executive officer, told the reunion.