Random Coincidence?

Not similar but a story from the antiques world.

Some years ago I bought an unusual Islamic corner cupboard in Portobello Rd but it was stolen in the course of delivery. Fortunately the delivery was insured. A few years later while shopping in the antiques quarter of Brussels I saw the cupboard at the back of a shop with two very similar style chairs. I subsequently bought the cupboard and chairs and had them transported to the UK. They matched a lot of my middle eastern furniture I had inherited from my grandmother.

It was a sheer coincidence that I went into the shop as it looked quite dingy and uninviting from the outside. Somehow I felt that the cupboard has called out to me through time and space and was determined that I was going to own it.

Got talking to some folks on a cruise, it turned out that they had known my Father, and we had several acquaintances in common.

This was 10 years after his death, and living in different parts of the country.

When doing the family tree we found that my great great grandfather had married my grandparents from the other side in his church. I've also discovered that his last church and home is half a mile from here.

Complicated one here.

When my DD married 20 years ago, she wanted sweet peas in her bouquet, but May was too early for them. So early in the year I put something in the parish mag asking if anyone could grow her some in time. A lovely old gentleman offered to do this, and did indeed come up with beautiful sweet peas for the wedding.

Here's the coincidence ... later someone kindly did my ancestry for me and it turned out that this man was distantly related to us, and thus of course to the bride. We were incomers to the village and had no idea that we were related to several local people, including a tenor in the choir I run, whom I had known for years!

I was sent on a training course with the young man who would be my assistant manager ,we had a few drinks on the frst evening and discovered he was the son of my Fathers first cousin.
That was 35 years ago and we kept in touch right up until he died earlier this year .He was only 55 and I still remember him as the wee guy with a cheeky smile I met all those years ago

My MIL was a £10 Pom. She was on the ship to Australia in the early 50s and was being sick over the side. A man asked her if she was alright but she didn't answer him as she had taken her teeth out. (she'd had them removed when she was 21 to avoid dental bills)
A year or so later she was introduced to a friend of a friend who she later married. FIL told the same story and it turned out he was the kind enquirer.

We have got to know a few people at our favourite sports club. One Saturday we were seated next to a couple we never really spoken to before for lunch and got talking. We exchanged names and I remarked her name sounds like a channel Island name.

We talked about the island connections and reasons for going there. We have family who live there I could not believe it when she showed me photos on her phone. Some of her family and one of her sister and my sisters! Who have lived there over fifty years and are best friends. I haven’t been there for years so I don’t know who they are friends with.

What a small world none of my family look alike so there is no resemblance at all between any of my siblings.

Pittcity

My MIL was a £10 Pom. She was on the ship to Australia in the early 50s and was being sick over the side. A man asked her if she was alright but she didn't answer him as she had taken her teeth out. (she'd had them removed when she was 21 to avoid dental bills)
A year or so later she was introduced to a friend of a friend who she later married. FIL told the same story and it turned out he was the kind enquirer.

What is a £10 Pom, please?

They paid £10 to emigrate to Australia where the slang for the British is Pom. It was a government scheme.

My in laws came home in the early 60s to visit family and never went back. Otherwise I'd never have met DH.

Met a couple on the same holiday as us in Austria one year. Didn’t keep in touch with them but two years later we bumped into them again on holiday in Corfu.

When my son left home he moved in with others and soon started a relationship with one of the girls. They bought a house and were together for 7 years when her father died of a very unusual cancer.Next time I visited my dad he told me his cousin's son had died of the same illness. It was the same person and the young people were horrified and broke up soon after. It probably wouldn't have done any harm but he soon met a much more suitable girl to marry.

25 years ago we moved to our current house. Talking to one of our neighbours, I discovered that her husband had been a close work colleague of my sister's. Both of them had died, quite separately, in road accidents and that the firm of architects who were responsible for approving the memorial to my sister, that we were putting in a church she had worked on, was his company.

We went on to discover much more in common and were frineds until she died.

Me and exh moved about a lot but ended up in my dream house, just across from my parents. It turned out my next door neighbour had delivered me. So similar to the op

When we lived in Hull (during my childhood), my Mum found that the family next-door, who also had five kids, were related to her via some cousins. The neighbours kept talking about various family members with the same surnames as some of Mum's relatives. Turned out they were the same people!

When we sold one of the houses we used to live in, the people who bought it were the DiL and son of my aunt's next door neighbour. Aunt and parents lived 150 miles away.

At a formal 'town reception' in Shropshire I fell into conversation with an elderly lady. She was a complete stranger to me. During the course of the conversation she asked where I was from originally. I told her the name of the Yorkshire village where I was born. The lady said she knew the village, as during the war her brother was the vicar of that village church. It turned out that her brother had baptised me when I was six weeks old. A lovely coincidence.

I was in hospital last year, about 70 miles away from my home town. I was waiting to be taken for an MRI, and my name was called very quickly - but there was another woman with the same name - not a popular name like Smith, for example. She was also the same age and on the next ward.

I have an unusual name - first name not very popular and second name almost unknown round here. There was a woman with identical name (totally unrelated) who worked for the LA, as I did. We sometimes got each other's expenses! - no-one could imagine there might be two of us!

Camping in Spain we discovered that the chap next door had been the first person on the scene when DH had a car accident 10 years earlier

In India I was chatting to a couple who it turned out had been at collage and recently had attended a reunion with our best friends.

Last week we were sipping a drink at a cafe in La Palma. The Spanish waiter asked where we lived in England. I said around 50 miles north of London. He said ‘ oh I have friends in * , which is the town we live in.

Oh, another was in France several years ago. DH spotted a car that he thought had once belonged to his Dad.
He went to chat to the owner who still had the Log book with his Dads signature in it.

Seems we have to be in another country for our coincidences.

On a cruise we met up with a lady who used to do SEND support at my school, before she moved to high school.
On a ferry to France I met a teacher I’d worked with who is now a vicar.

I went on a solo holiday in Cornwall I chose the cheapest B and B I could find online as I knew I d be out and about and only needed a room for sleeping in it was right at the end of the holiday I was talking to the owner and I asked him where he came from as he didn’t have a Cornish accent He told me it was a place I would never have heard of and said my home towns name !!

We went to live in Australia for a couple of years. About 6 weeks after we arrived we went out for a pizza at an Italian restaurant round the corner from our new Aussie flat. We got chatting to the waitress who had recently come out to Australia from Scotland. In fact she had lived in the block of flats at the bottom of our street in Scotland and had emigrated the same week as us.

How many of these posts have involved asking somebody where they were from
Just saying