Neat coincidences. What neat coincidences were you a part of? My parents had a friend who had an old

[applegrove]

farmhouse down the South Shore of Nova Scotia. It was build in the late 1700s. My parents visited him for there for years. I was called the Westhaver house. I did family genealogy and back at the same time we have ancestors who were Westhavers. So my ancestors spent time at that house too no doubt, only 250 years earlier. Per chance some of our ancestors were born there.

[Scuba]

1. In 1968 I started a summer job, and a guy with the same name as I started the same day....

.... his dad (Sr.) worked there too, so there were three of us.

About 4 years later my wife's car collided with his.

[HeiressofBickworth]

2. My best friend introduced me to genealogy research

20 years later, we discovered we are 8th cousins.

[Chan790]

5. That's better than my geneology story.

Mine's just sad and a personal embarrassment.

When I was in 6th grade, I took a geneology elective and I was excited so I called up my grandmom because she was old (N.B. She was barely 60) figuring she must know a lot of the family history. So she gives me her father's history going back to Lebanon but tells me that she knows nothing of her mother's family, in fact she's never met any of the Pierce-side relatives and sends me down the block to her mother's house to ask Nanny, my great-grandmother. Nanny who was the sweetest old lady, as soon as she figured out why I was visiting yells at me and throws me out of her house. So the end of the quarter comes and goes and my class ends, I have my mother's mother's father's roots and I have all of my other three grandparents' roots...but I don't have the Pierce side relatives.

So last ditch, I ask my cousin Barbara (a name Nanny had insisted on but never explained) who is the family genealogist and almost as old as Grandma...and I get my answer.

The reason none of us have ever met the Pierce-side relatives is because they disowned Nanny for becoming pregnant by and marrying a "brown" person, my grant-grandfather (who it turned out was a lout and really piss-poor card-cheat that ended up being shot in the back and thrown off the Bulkeley Bridge in Hartford for cheating in a mob card game.) and the last time she saw any of them was at her cousin Barbara's wedding to George, a Senator's son. They'd probably have welcomed her back after great-grandpa Roger got shot in the back if she hadn't almost-immediately run-off and married (shock of shock, horror of horrors!) a Native American. After that, any time anybody asked, they told people she had died. Back to the past-present, Barbara (neé Pierce) Bush and her Senator's-son husband, George Herbert Walker Bush are now the First Lady and the President of the United States....and their moron son (what makes him what? A sixth cousin? The son of my grand-grandmother's cousin.) would go on to be the worst US President in history. So I'm related by marriage to two terrible Presidents (George Walker Bush and George Herbert Walker Bush), A war criminal (Prescott Bush) and indirectly-descended from a third godawful US President. (Franklin Pierce)

No wonder Nanny didn't want to talk about it. I'd much rather be beige than related to wankers. Fortunately, there's no family resemblance.

[HeiressofBickworth]

9. That's a great story!!!!!

Sounds like Nanny has some stories she could tell.

[Chan790]

11. Had, she died soon after that.

My grandfather was the one with the great stories though. The problem was that he'd tell them, then the next time you heard them they've have gotten more outlandish. He worked with a guy with big feet, over the years he told that story this poor guy's feet went from size-12 to the size of tennis rackets.

[cliffordu]

3. My ex wife's mother was a stripper at Jack Ruby's club

in Dallas...(For those of you under 35, He shot Oswald dead a couple of days after the Kennedy assassination).

45 years later I was served chili and a diet coke by Oswald's daughter in a little place in Austin, Texas.

FURTHER:

In college in 1973 I lost a girlfriend to a fucker named Carlos Batista - nephew of the Cuban dictator deposed by Castro.

Further:

I ran into Oliver Stone one night in LA - while he was filming "The Doors".

We didn't talk about cuba, Kennedy, Oswald, or the Shah of Iran.

I did suggest a great bowl of chili in Austin, though.

[Art_from_Ark]

4. I was waiting at a barber shop the other day in Tokyo,

listening to "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" on my iPod, while the shop was playing its own music on its audio system. Immediately after the song finished on my iPod, I heard the song start playing again. But it wasn't playing on my iPod-- it was playing on the barber shop's system.

[Chan790]

6. I've randomly been present at five different acts of terror or natural disasters in metro DC.

1.) I was standing in front of the Harris-Teeter on Army-Navy Drive in Arlington, VA when the plane hit the Pentagon.
2.) I was standing at my bus stop at the intersection of Discovery Place & Wayne and Dixon Avenues in Silver Spring, MD when a man with a bomb seized the lobby of the Discovery Tower.
3.) I was at lunch in the arbor of a local park when the only DC sniper shooting to actually take place inside DC occurred 2.5 blocks away.
4.) I was stranded on a bus for 12 hours on 16th Street NW during what is locally known as the snowpocalypse.
5.) I was one of a small handful of people to require medical attention following the earthquake. I needed stitches and to be checked for concussion after a flowerpot fell off my landlord's bookcase on my head.

As if there was any reason why I hate DC.

[HeiressofBickworth]

7. Coincidences?

Are you sure you aren't CAUSING them? Oh, dear, now THEY will be watching you.......

[cliffordu]

8. That's what I'm thinking -

Look up Tyrone Slothrop......

[Chan790]

12. Great book...

I've sometimes wondered that myself. It only happens in DC though in three times living here over 12 years and never in any of the other places I've lived. I do wonder too if the city is out to kill me.

[cliffordu]

13. Good question...

Maybe London would be better....lol.....

[libodem]

10. Both of your replys are really interesting

Wow.

[HopeHoops]

14. I live about 12 miles from our 17th century homestead and didn't know that when I moved here.

[mikeytherat]

15. My sister is at a big NYE party in New York City, and a friend mentions,

"You're from Virginia, and so is my friend Bill." My sis and Bill get talking. Soon find out Bill grew up in the small town where my parents live. Further talk discloses that my parents bought their house from Bill's parents, and still live in that house!

mikey_the_rat

[BarbaRosa]

16. Birthdays

I was born March 30, 1951, my sister was born April 19, 1953, MamaRosa, my bride of 37yrs, was born April 10, 1952. Smack inbetween me and my sister. Nothing earth shattering but kinda fun.

[applegrove]

17. I was just playing some Tracy Chapman when a friend on facebook posted the very same album with a

link.

[madmom]

18. My hubby's great grandmother on his father's side has

the same last maiden name as my great grandmother on my father's side. We didn't know this until we were married about 10 years.

[applegrove]

20. My grandfather's maternal grandfather had the same last name as his father. But the families

were not related.

[madmom]

22. That's the scary thing, we don't know if they were related, they are from

the same area of the country, same area of same state even, so it's quite possible they were.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

19. My daughter was enrolled in a physics course of some sort at Princeton University...

She called to give us an update, and mentioned her professor.


He was a childhood friend of my husband's; they had lost contact with each other after graduating from high school!

[Ikonoklast]

21. "There was this one time, at band camp..."