Genealogy is a hobby that seems like it could be mostly straightforward and methodical. However, there is much room for serendipitous situations and genealogists delight in sharing their stories of strange but true things that have happened in the course of their genealogy research. I think that part of the reason why genealogists love to share and read stories of impossible sounding circumstances under which genealogical information has been discovered is that it gives every genealogist a source of hope that the answers that they seek are out there, somewhere, waiting to be uncovered albeit possibly in a very different way than they set out to uncover them. I found a few of these fun stories online and I hope that if you are in a rut with your research, these stories and others like them can give you an infusion of hope at a time when it is needed.
One story of genealogical coincidence is that a woman researching her Swedish ancestry requested that a Swedish microfilm be sent to her local library so that she could look through it for the only Swedish words that she knew – the names of her ancestors. When the microfilm arrived, the woman began to look at it. After a short while of viewing pages and pages of unfamiliar words, she realized that it would take her a very, very long time to read through the entire film looking for her ancestors. She began to spin the film quickly but the pages were blurred and she realized that she was unlikely to find any information that way so she stopped spinning it. Wouldn’t you know that film stopped spinning right at the page that contained her grandfather’s name as well as the names of other ancestors and some dates that she had been looking for.
Another great genealogy luck story is that a very dedicated genealogy researcher went to the library one day every week. One day, a woman whom this researcher had never met asked the researcher to help her find a book that none of the librarians could help her find. It was a specific family history book about a person who happened to be the researcher’s grandfather. The researcher had the book, and invited the woman to her home to look through it. In the book, the woman found the information that she had been looking for – the date and place of burial of one of her ancestors.
Have you experienced a genealogical coincidence? Have you heard of any good ones? I always enjoy hearing about these kinds of stories because they remind me that there is sometimes more to research than the methodical stuff, that there is occasional magic that happens in genealogy.
Photo by melodi2 on morguefile.com.