On Christmas Eve my grandmother died. At 104 years old I think she had a pretty good run I think. That’s not the weird part. We buried her in the plot that my grandfather has been in since 1965. This is an old cemetery on Staten Island that is taking no new customers beyond those who already have plots.
So anyway, we were there at the graveside service. Like I said this is an old cemetery. The rows are pretty close together. One row was about fifteen feet away and facing my grandparents tombstone. My daughter points out a tombstone directly across from my grandfather. She found it interesting that it had her mother’s maiden name. I looked closer and realized that the first name was the same as her brother and father. I instantly said “I think that’s your great-grandfather”. Sure enough I confirmed with my ex-wife that it was her grandfather.
So two sets of my two daughter’s great-grandparents are buried directly across from each other in the same cemetery on State Island. None of them knew each other in life. Very weird.
Wow that is kinda cool. Did they live in the same area even though they never met? Maybe it was the only nearby cemetery circa 1950-whatever.
Eta I’m very sorry for your loss.
Its funny I’ve had no good way to react to that. At 104 years old I don’t see it as a real loss. You can’t really ask for more. I’ve had plenty of relatives go very young. I can’t feel to bad about this.
My grandmother chose that cemetery years ago because that’s where her mother is buried. She didn’t live close by there ever or go to that church. No idea about my ex’s family.
If I can piggyback with another grandparent-related coincidence, I just found out that my paternal grandfather (lives in Virginia) and maternal grandmother (lives in Texas) went to the same high school (in a suburb of Chicago). They were even there at the same time, two grades apart. I thought that was kinda neat.
I posted this before, but I knew someone who left Halifax after the explosion, and moved to a suburb of Boston, and something like 75 years later discovered that a schoolmate from Halifax had been living just around the corner from her for almost all of that time.
Not quite as odd because everyone still lives in Ohio but my two best friends - a married couple - his dad and her mom went to the same school and were in band together. Neither parent remembers each other. How unremarkable is that? 
Loach it’s interesting that it took this many years for anyone to notice!
I don’t know, I got a little ticked when people were all, “Well, gee, she was 104yrs old!”, when my Gran died. It started to really wear on me.
I don’t care if she was 208, damn it, she was my Gran!.
(So sorry for your loss!)
I found out a couple of years ago that my paternal great-great-great grandfather and my maternal great great great grandfather are the same person :eek:. (There might be another great in there.)
Anyway, my fathers branch of the family moved west just before the civil war and the two branches completely lost touch, until my father met my mother in Chicago in the early sixties…
The story is not really as cool as yours, but my family tree looks more like a bush.
Could they have belonged to the same fraternal, religious, or workman’s society? Many immigrants of that time saved up to buy a plot of land together, so they would have a final resting place and not have to burden their families. Sometimes that explains the closeness of all the graves.
And, I am sorry for your loss. I’m sure she was a wonderful woman.
-Wallet-
Nope I checked with my mother. It is just one of several cemeteries that residents of the Rosebank section of Staten Island would use. For some reason my grandmother decided to use that cemetery even though she hadn’t lived near there for decades by the time my grandfather died. Just a coincidence.
Three of my coincidences occurred near blackjack tables.
[ul]
[li]The first time I visited HongKong I knew AFAIK only one person there – a California-resident engineer born in HongKong, who had perhaps arranged a HongKong vacation with a small intrigue.[/li]
That man and I met in a Macau casino by chance (though I knew he was in Hongkong area, and he’d likely mentioned Macau).
[li] A certain England-born woman and I met in Asia; I gave her a book, she gave me something. Our acquaintance was brief, yet she’s the closest to an England-born girlfriend I’ve ever had. (Yes, I phrased this to exclude a certain Queen’s subject born elsewhere in Europe.)[/li]
That woman and I met again, a few years later, by chance at a (the?) casino in Kathmandu.
[li] Once I ran into a college dorm-mate at a casino on Las Vegas Strip. He was also operating as a semi-professional blackjack player.[/li][/ul]
Some weeks ago I mentioned on these boards that my wife and I, both our children, my father and his father are all six on the same Birthday cycle. This is odds against, to put it mildly
Pretty much everybody has that in their family tree someplace. What’s rare is to know when/who it was.
As long as it’s not a stick. 
septimus do you have a gambling problem…? 
Okay, I have to address this (not quite extremely weird) coincidence, going on right now.
I just left an SDMB thread about debunking some ghost story or whatnot, and only looked at it long enough to notice somebody getting snarky about there being no such thing as ghosts. This always irks me, but I’m pretty much a lurker on SDMB, read a lot more than I post. But for some reason, I just had to crack back with my own snarky remark and linked three threads that were filled with anecdotes of Dopers sharing their personal ghost stories. First time I’ve ever snarked in my 10 years on SDMB.
So, first place I surf to is this thread… started by the same Doper that made the snarky remark. And how ironic – a post about a coincidence at a cemetery.
So, I ask the question, Mr. Loach: could it be that coincidences are sometimes the work of souls in another (for lack of better wording) dimension? I believe this. My life has been littered with coincidences; I venture to guess more than most people experience. Many of them about a screenplay I read while I was a security guard at a movie studio, but other stuff as well. Maybe they’re not exactly ghosts, but they’re something these occurrences are too coincidental to be random.
No.
What makes you say that?
Evidence for ghosts is all anecdotal, which is not evidence at all. In order to accept something as real you really need something tangible, provable. Stories just don’t cut it, unfortunately.
So far, all experiences with the apparently supernatural are easily explicable by the mundane, as long as we know all the facts. Leaping to the conclusion that anything you can’t explain must be supernatural is the wrong approach, you should at first explore the things we do know, before turning to something beyond science or logic to get answers. Just because it seems like it couldn’t possibly be a coincidence doesn’t mean it wasn’t one.
Your story gives me chicken skin.
Another one : it came recently to light that my paternal grandmother and my SIL’s grandparents had been living across the street from each other in a southern France town (my brother and his spouse met and are living in Paris suburbs).
It’s highly likely that they knew each other, but they all had passed away when my brother and SIL met.