June 19 is an important day in my family for many reasons, some coincidental and some not.
On June 19, 1965, my father left France to come to America.
On June 19, 1966, he and my mother got married. I don’t know if the date was an intentional choice.
On December 19, 1971, I was born, making June 19 my half-birthday.
On June 19, 1995, I left America to come to Japan exactly 30 years after my father embarked on his big journey. This was unintentional: I’d been waiting for several months for my work visa to come through, and when it did the school sponsoring me said “great, you’re first class is on Tuesday. Get a ticket NOW!”
On June 19 2002, my wife and I were married. This was semi-intentional. She wanted to wait until I had reliably permanent employment, which I happened to find in May. I asked if she was ok with carrying on a family tradition, she was, and so we headed down to the town office on June 19.
Still on the subject of my wife (BTW, on her father’s side there are six girls and two boys among the cousins, bringing the total to fourteen girls and three boys), all her aunts and uncles (four sets on her mother’s side and three on her father’s), and her parents, have two kids, with one exception–that exception involves twins, and there were still only two pregnancies.
Both my wife and I have (in my case had) a father named Dennis. We both have (in my case had) a grandmother named Alice.
My great-grandmother Laura fled home at age 14 because she didn’t like the much-older husband her mother was trying to foist on her. She went to Barcelona and got a job as a kitchen maid, eventually graduating to cook. Her masters were a Guardia Civil high-ranking officer’s family.
My great-grandfather Eduardo left home at age 18, for his military service. Being one of the 6 tallest guys in his “reemplazo” (lit. replacement… the lot of guys who were joining the service on the same day), he got assigned to the Royal Guard and, in his own words “after 18 months watching the King have breakfast there was no way I’d go back to potatoes for breakfast, potatoes for lunch and potatoes for dinner.” So he joined the GC. Under “literacy” he said “no”: he actually could do numbers and read some, but figured it was better to pull down than push up. A few weeks after joining the GC, he was on duty as the honor guard at the post commander’s office when the PC caught him reading - after some interrogation re. that “no” in the forms, the PC told him “nothing in the Regs forbids reading while on honor guard… actually, here, take a copy and start reading them hard, because there’s exams for corporal next month.”
On his first date with his boss’ cook, the new corporal informed her that he needed to get married within six months so his younger brother would officially become their widowed mother’s only means of support and be able to skip the military service. The cook evidently didn’t think this was too bad as proposals went
I was born on March 13, the anniversary of the Anschluss. Middlebro on May 12, the anniversary of my maternal grandparents’ wedding (you may have seen me mention them as the Grandparents From Hell). Lilbro on October 7, anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto. Dad liked to irk Mom saying all his kids had been born on the anniversary of some battle or other…
If you add my parents’ birthdays you get my sister’s birthday. If you subtract them you get mine. (This just refersw to the day of the month).
Two of my wife’s brothers were born on the same day, but in different years.
When my Dad had his first heart attack, we called all the relatives, but had to leave messages for a few. When his brother called back, we thought it was a response to the message, but he was calling to say that their mother had died . . . at about the same time. (For awhile my Mom was convinced that Grandma had been trying to take Dad with her - I eventually convinced her that Grandma just refused to be upstaged. She was the sick one here, thank you.)
On the other side, Grandpa died on Grandma’s birthday. Then Grandma upstaged him a few years later but dying at midnight on the evening of December 31, 1999. So I can say that my Grandmother was not Y2K compatible.
No one on my wife’s side of the family has been born on an even-numbered day. They’ve listed out over 30 confirmed birthdays, and every single one has been born on an odd-numbered day. I still can’t figure out how that even approaches being a statistical possibility.
That streak will continue, when my nephew is born a little later today.
I’m getting a 1.646610[sup]-9[/sup] as your odds on that one (using 30 as the number of occurences). Considerably better than the odds of all of them being born on an even day (5.209610[sup]-10[/sup].)
I was born on June 19 (1964). Can I join your family?
My uncle’s birthday is June 18 and my Aunt’s birthday (his sister) is the 28th. That’s not that strange, but if you add in my husband’s family (and our son, born June 21) we have family members with birthdays almost every day between the 18th and the 28th. No other month has that many birthdays in it, even September, where my husband, his sister, and her husband all have birthdays within 5 days of each other, but for different years.
My sister and her husband have birthdays on February 9th, although they were born in different years. They got married on the 9th, but they picked that on purpose.
My grandparents got married on her birthday. They were very old for their first marriage in 1940–she was 35 and he was older (not sure how old). When I got married I was the same age as my grandmother was when she got married; when I had my children I was exactly the same age my grandmother was when she had hers (37 and 40).
My sister and I had some neat-ish coincidences about our births. I’m May 7 and she’s June 19, 5 years apart, but some other coincidences are: We were both born on Fridays; Mom was still in the hospital on Mother’s Day with me and Father’s day with her; we are both girls; I was born on my grandparents anniversary, while Kat was the day before my Grandfather’s birthday (and 2 days before my parent’s anniversary); we both had something wrong with a foot (she had “twin toes”, where two of her toes didn’t separate so just look like one fat toe, while I had a twisted foot that required a couple of months of therapy but is normal now). That’s all I remember.
I’m the oldest of my dad’s second marriage, and my birthday and the birthday of the son (oldest child) from the first marriage are separated by one day (and 15 years).
My husband’s first & last names are the same as a little boy I babysat many years ago. My husband’s younger sister has the same first & last names as that same boy’s older sister.
My maternal grandparents died exactly two years to the day apart.
My older brother has had a handful of wives, and only one gave him children (1boy, 1girl.) After they divorced, and after Mom and her older sister died, we received pictures of our maternal grandmother as a young woman. She looked exactly like my brother’s children’s mother. I know, people tend to marry mates that look like their parents, but we had never seen the picture before, and Mom didn’t look very much like Grandmother did when she was young.
By the way, my brother’s present wife has outlasted the rest, and I think she’s the one.
My mother was born Nov. 27 (her sister March 7, her brother Jan 17); she had 3 girls, all born on the 7th day (May, July, Sept). My first younger brother was due Aug 7, but she had him on the 4th because she fell down some stairs. My second younger brother was due Jan. 7, but she had him Dec. 27 after slipping on some ice and … falling down some stairs. When the lung cancer got bad, she repeatedly said she didn’t why to mess up my brother’s birthday. She died Dec. 23. To this day, I think she willed it.
I have 3 boys…2 born on the 9th and one on the 13, though his due date was the 9th. He thought Friday the 13th was a cooler birthday evidently.
