Name someone whose family has lived in the same house for 100 years.

Chances are you can’t.

But farms are a different story. Indiana has about 60,000 farms, and in the mid-1970s the state started recognizing what it calls Hoosier Homesteads, farms that have been in the same family for 100 years or more. Since the program was started, 5,000 family farms have been honored.

This year, four area farms were recognized: The Johnson farm, two different Marbach farms in Adams County and the John B. Gilbert farm in Wells County.

Normally, as far as the Indiana Department of Agriculture knows, families that are recognized accept their award and go back to the farm and get back to work.

Down in Wells County, though, the family decided the honor was worth celebrating within the family.

Joyce Roberts, who is in her 80s, occupies the old Gilbert homestead, part of a 160-acre spread her grandfather bought in 1911. It was her grandfather who put up the big old barn about the same time, and it stands there with the accumulations that four generations of farm family generates.

The farm was divided when her grandfather died, and Roberts’s part is 80 acres, not big but large enough for one of her nephews to grow corn, beans and oats.

It was Roberts’ children who decided a celebration was justified. They sent out invitations to family members, and there are a lot of them. Roberts was one of eight children, and she had six children of her own.

She was expecting up to 150 family members to attend, but the idea caught on within the family. Now, 190 members of the extended farm family from all over the country plan to attend.

It will be an old-fashioned gathering, with lunch prepared by family members, old-fashioned games like gunny sack races and three-legged races, the kind of stuff you just don’t find people doing any more, except on 100-year-old farms.

Scarecrows will mark the way for family members traveling to the old homestead, and there will be a brass band brought in from Chicago, and cakes and popsicles for the crowd of 190 in the afternoon.

And then there will be stories about life in a long-passed era.

“The grandchildren are enthralled to hear stories” of life on the farm, before telephones and electricity and when mules were the most efficient power source for running farm machinery.

Roberts is sure that family members will have plenty of stories to tell, too, but with scores of people sharing memories, “They better make it quick,” Roberts said.

Jeannie Keating is the media relations manager for the Department of Agriculture, and she was pleased to hear of a family actually celebrating a century of family heritage on an old Hoosier farmstead.

Ninety-eight percent, no, maybe 99 percent of all Hoosier farms are family owned, Keating said.

For a single family to hang on to a farm for 100 years or more, through droughts and floods and recessions and depressions and wars is saying something.

You have to be innovative and have perseverance, Keating said, and all these families have great stories to tell.

The bash, by the way, is by invitation only.