We are all the product of a series of unlikely events. Here are the events that led to me.
After my grandmother passed we found her memoirs from the war. While reading them we discovered that she had been engaged to a different man prior to marrying my grandfather. He left for war in 1939 and never came back. A few years later she married my grandfather just before he too went off to war. Luckily for me he came back and started a family.
MY grandmother, Nana, was the youngest of four daughters. When she was nine her mother died. Her father remarried. Family lore has it that stepmother wanted her four stepdaughters out of the home. One by one they left to become nannies. Nana certainly didn’t want to leave. She had applied for a job with the local railway. I found out from a cousin that stepmother intercepted the letter offering her the job and burned it. Nana duly left home.
She worked as a nanny in London where she eventually met my grandfather so, yeah all the alternative futures burned up in that fireplace. I tend to think it worked out well for her. She was brought up a strict baptist - no singing or dancing, precious little fun. When I was little she used to sing to me - no nursery rhymes because she had never heard them, it was all music hall songs 
I think she may have had some fun in London.
I’m sure WW2 was a big one for many families.
My grandfather joined the navy and was an AA gunner on a LST that participated in countless island assaults in the south pacific and phillipines. The only details we know are from his best friend who he discussed his experiences in detail with. That friend was part of the flight deck crew of the USS Yorktown and survived its sinking at the battle of midway…
With the war over but his enlistment not quite up, he was assigned to some kind of busywork walking shore patrol detail. Where he met my paternal grandmother out with a few friends on the beach.
Events that ended a branch of our family:
-Thalidomide
-A serial killer (you’ve heard of him)
-The Lusitania
Events that moved ancestors into proximity, who otherwise wouldn’t have met:
-Trail of tears
-Potato Famine
That story is all too common. My grandfather came from the same place(Lodz), as a child, with his parents, to the US, in 1914. No other family came, no other family member was ever heard from again after the second war.
Oh wow, can I really relate to this story. If Bismarck hadn’t been so ambitious and set on unifying the Germanies things could have been different. One of my great-grandfathers was sixteen and not really keen on being drafted as cannon fodder, so he stowed away on a ship and came to the US. A brother was already here so that helped. If he hadn’t done that then my maternal grandfather wouldn’t have been around and at least 25% of my genes would be different.
On my father’s side, well, him mom was almost forty when my dad was born, the welcome but certainly not planned child, the baby of the family. It wasn’t common in the late 1920’s for women that old to have kids.
Later, when my dad asked my mother out for the first time she said she already had a date for that night. My dad said “break it” What if he hadn’t? Would they have ended up together? Mom said within a week of their first date she knew he was “the one”
I posted in the thread about Mormons how all of my gr-gr-gr- grandparents were converts to the church or were born into it. Had Joseph Smith been better at being a simple conman and not needed to switch to selling a religion, then none of these 64 lines of English, Norwegian, Danish and Midwest farmers would have gathered with other like-minded believers and crossed the plains into the deserts of Utah.
Same thing happened with me. My dad was the third child of the second wife.
Stuff like this makes me feel like in the west, the opportunity to really make a better life for your family isn’t available like it was (which is a good thing, because standards of living have gone up across the board).
A hundred years ago, or in the modern age if you are in a poor country, you could really bring your family up. You could make sure they got to live in a safe, free country and that your kids and grandkids had an education and standard of living you could only dream about. Just one person with a good job who lived in a good country (or who moved from a rural area to the big city) could dramatically improve the life of their entire extended family. You could make sure everyone had basic food, shelter, healthcare, education, etc. You could let a sick person retire with the money you sent home. You could help people escape a society that was oppressive or backwards and let them live somewhere better.
But for lots of us who are more or less middle class, there just isn’t that much room to move up. Yeah being rich is better than middle class, but its not the same I guess.
My great grandfather came to this country as an immigrant. One of his sons (my grandfather) built up a business worth several million dollars that he split and gave to his kids. All of his kids were able to use the money to help fund their retirement. It seems stories like that aren’t as possible now, where you go from immigrant to multimillionaire in a couple generations. But its good that they aren’t as possible, because standards of living have gone up enough that its hard to have that big of an impact on your family anymore.
Operation Manna, April 29/30 1945. If not for that, my dad would have starved to death, and I would not exist. It was the drop of food (mainly bread) by British and later American bombers over occupied Holland. They had eaten their last tulip bulbs and line-seed oil days earlier. He had signs of hunger edema.
I have a very similar story in my ancestry. It’s not uncommon among Jews in America. We are so lucky to be here.
My mom’s family lives in Kentucky, most of them even to this day. When she was almost 6 Mom was burned over more than half her body when her dress caught fire. She spent the next 6 months at the University of KY hospital healing. The medical staff helped her get ready to start school and when she finally did she was skipped 2 grades. She graduated at 17, started college that fall and when her father died suddenly a few months later, her mom let her move to her brother’s in Michigan to get a good paying job in order to send enough money back for the family.
That’s how she met my dad at a Detroit VFW, a sailor home on leave; they were married the following June and I (an anniversary baby) came along in March 4 years later.
Had my mom still been in high school, her mom wouldn’t have let her drop out to get a job, much less move to Michigan. Her excruciating burns meant my brother and I exist today.