There are several odd coincidences regarding dates in my family.
My niece, the oldest grandchild, was born 7 years to the hour (possibly to the minute- definitely within 10-15 minutes) after my father’s death.
Every generation of my immediate family since at least 1835 has had a member born on November 23.
On the row of graves where my father is buried, 5 of the 7 graves have the date August 22 (4 as a birthdate and 1 as a death date). My mother commented on this odd coincidence several times. She was buried (in another cemetery) on August 22, a date she had seen on headstones so often she commented about it.
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law have the same birthday (dd/mm/yy), though as if to thumb their nose at astrology they could not be more different.
Any odd coincidences in your family? (Doesn’t have to be just dates.)
Uh, all three of us children were each born the day after a major holiday. New Years, Valentines and Christmas, respectively. And all the males in our family were born under the sign of Capricon. Which is… vaguely interesting, if you go in for that sort of thing. Both sets of grandparents died on the same date, too. I forget how many years apart though.
My father was born on April 23. My brother Mike was born January 23.
My mother was born on October 27. My brother Mark was born on January 27.
Although I’m not related to Ronald Reagan (other than in the “if you go back to Charlemagne, all people of European ancestry are probably his descendants” fashion), it became a source of amusement when we realized that he was the “birthday twin” (February 6, 1911) of my maternal grandmother. Grandma had voted several times for Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, which should give you some idea of how diametrically opposed her politics and “Ronnie’s” were.
My grandfather was the birthday twin of Hermann Göring (12 Jan 1893), which I thought was cool because I had a huge biographical interest in for a couple of years. (I’m a birthday twin of the kid who played Albert, the adopted son on Little House on the Prairie; I’ve wondered out of curiosity whatever happened to him because of this.)
The birth months of my immediate famiy members go in a straight row without any skipping. Such as one birthday in January, one in February, one in March etc. When you include the extended family, almost everyone either shares a birthday with another relative, or has a relative with a birthday no more than three days before or after theirs. That’s probably not that odd though.
My great-grandfather was in the Army Medical Corps during World War I and stationed in Texas. My husband’s grandfather’s much older half-brother (for whom my husband is named) was a Mennonite who refused, as a pacifist, to put on the uniform or any branch of the military. When he, along with several other Mennonite boys in their town in Oklahoma, was drafted and refused to serve, he was sent, against his will for a military physical to determine if he was in violation of the draft process or if he might be “rejected” on some medical technicality. My great-grandfather carried out the physical examinations on that group of draftees, himself, and passed them all as physically sound. My husband’s grandfather’s half-brother still refused to serve. He was sent to Leavenworth and died in less than a year, just short of his twentieth birthday (I think), of influenza. His body was shipped home to Oklahoma – not dressed as a prisoner, which would have made his family proud, but dressed as an Army Private.
That wasn’t a real knee-slapper when we put the facts together on that story.
My wife’s mother and my father immigrated to the USA from the same European city in the same month and year, and both married someone from the same US state. Thirty-six years after leaving their hometown, they finally met.
I was born at 1:54, my brother at 3:54, and my sister at 12:54.
Birthdays in my family include April 13, June 13, October 13, November 13 (x2). But all those 13s feel more unlucky than unlikely.
My son was born on my grandmother’s 100th birthday. He was about 2 weeks early, so I wasn’t even thinking about the date…didn’t realize the coincidence until I called my parents with the news, and my dad reminded me.
Ooh…I have another one. My mom thought that she couldn’t have children, and so my parents adopted a boy, then a girl (me), and then SURPRISE! got pregnant and had a boy.
Then, my older brother & his wife thought they couldn’t have children, and they adopted a boy, then a girl, and the SURPRISE! got pregnant and had a boy.
None of the adoptions had a request for a particular sex…all were just coincidences.
One of my brothers, me and my father all have our birthdays exactly a week apart.
My father and his father both got married on their birthdays, possibly just to make it easier to remember their anniversary, but that may not have been the story given to their wives.
Mt wife is from the Boston area born to a full-blooded Italian-American father and an English born Canadian mother. My family where I get my last name arrived at Jamestown in 1610. All of my other known family is technically Southern now but I an interested in genealogy and there are a few stray x-grandparents on both sides.
When my wife and I started going out at age 18, people kidded about looking alike and acquaintances assumed that we were brother and sister to the point we needed to make it obvious that we aren’t.
Our second daughter Sophie was born three years ago and came down with one of the rarest genetic diseases in the world (only 50 cases ever known). We got the best care from doctors and geneticists from all over the world at Children’s Hospital Boston both before and many months after she died. They actually invented an in utero genetic test specifically for us before my wife got pregnant with our third daughter. The test came back negative at month 5 and we could continue with the pregnancy. Our daughter Olivia just turned one and is healthy as they come and proven free of the disease thanks to all the effort that went into an ultra-rare disease. She had a 25% chance of getting it as would any other children we could have (we can’t go though that ordeal again though).
During a consultation with Harvard geneticists, I finally got up the nerve to ask if the disease indicated that my wife and I are somehow related. They indicated that such a rare genetic mutation is extraordinarily unlikely to happen twice in separate lines so we probably are in some way through our English or Scottish lineages although it doesn’t have to be that close but still extremely unusual genetically.