Villages Stories....
 

I met a man tonight that grew up with my brother in law...knew several of my school mates....what a small, small world!!!!!

Anyone else have a story like this? Tell me your story! This place is amazing! I have met so many amazing ppl, that have a connection to my life!!! You?

I met the agent that was assigned to us here, only to find out she not only worked a mile from me in Michigan we had many, many business friends in common...then I found out that she is friends with a young couple that I have known since they were in our youth group...I say young but in reality, they are now grandparents..wow, time does fly!

I was reading the Daily Sun one morning and it had done a feature story on a female pioneer in a mostly all male occupation. The location was familiar, the timeframe was my time, and when they listed what her maiden name was, lo and behold, it was someone I knew pretty well in high school but hadn't talked to or seen in over 30 years. We reconnected here in TV, have played golf, and had several other mini-reunions with other classmates passing through town.

Another time, I read an article about a local author...the name and face sounded familiar, I tracked him down and sure enough he was the same gentleman who was once a good friend of my Dad. I remembered him from when I was a child/teenager and hadn't seen him in 40 years.

I have had several other chance encounters in TV with people who had connections to my home town. Didn't take long to find mutual acquaintances.

Yes, our worlds do get smaller and smaller.

We moved in next to a divorced gent who keeps to himself, so nobody in the neighborhood knows anything about him. I have chatted with him on a few occasions. Here's what we have in common. I knew his father-in-law, who was the department administrator at my first aerospace job right out of college. For a while, this new neighbor had lived a few streets away from me on Long Island. At some point we had both worked for the same systems consulting firm in Virginia.

A few months after we moved here in 2006, new neighbors moved in next door. We invited them over for coffee and learned that they came from the same town as we had. As the wife and I continued talking, we learned that we had gone to the same high school and actually knew each other although we hadn't seen each other in...well, many years!

Perhaps not from our home town but better yet..........from my family tree.

Just the other day I was contacted by a "cousin" in genealogy with whom I've been sharing research the past 12 years or more on ancestry.com of our Italian roots.
Her ancestors went to the upper peninsula of Michigan; she and her husband raised their family in Texas. Well, they are wintering in THE VILLAGES........plus she told me that another "cousin" who shares our ancestry and roots on ancestry.com , who raised her family in Utica, New York, is also wintering in THE VILLAGES.

I often think that there must be many many more to which we are all connected..........

Small world.

Only 6 degrees of separation!!

Neighbor
 

My wife and I were hosting an Easter dinner with family last year here in The Villages. My brother and his wife were here and we invited her father (who lives in Tampa). When her father drove up we went outside to greet him and heard him yell "Hey skinny!" to our across-street neighbor. It turned out that he and the the neighbor were high school pals and "Skinny" was the neighbors nickname. It is indeed a small world.
:MOJE_whot:

My wife and I went to the St. Charles Social Club for the first time (about 3 years ago) and I introduced myself to another guy who looked lost. He invited us to sit with them at their table. They had only moved to The Villages a couple of weeks before the meeting. In the course of conversation, it came out that his wife and I went to the same high school in Minneapolis and when she told me her maiden name, I knew her! She and I were in the same homeroom for 3 years. The story gets better with another twist.

The room at Seabreeze was kind of noisy for talking so we went to the lobby. While she and I were catching up on people we both knew, my wife and her husband were talking. Turns out her husband and I have the same birthday (day, month, and year) and we both worked our entire careers in Human Resources. Now, is that spooky or what?

What were the possibilities of me striking up a conversation with him? I think there must be some reason we met like that but it has not happened yet.

My wife was talking to an Orlando Sentinel reporter in The Villages last year and related that story to her. It got made into a half page article in The Sentinel.

We have remained very good friends with this couple - I have to find out the future reason for that chance meeting!

Today I went to a presentation at AAA regarding Ireland. The gentleman helping with the presentation was from Ireland, county Kerry. In the course of our conversation it was discovered that his grandfather was in the same brigade as my father in Ireland during the "troubles". My father was an IRA fighter in the 20's and they shared the same last name so we are probably related. Small world indeed.

So very wonderful to hear I am not the only one....I know there are many more!!!! Yet another reason to love this place!!!

Went to a meeting of the Indiana Club two years ago and met an old class mate. He and I graduated together. He and his wife and my husband and I have now become good friends and enjoy the Orange Blossom Opry together.

They're my stories ... and I'm sticking with them!
 

Three months after we moved into our second (and last!) Villages home, the house next door changed hands, and a woman moved in. “Welcome to the neighborhood!” and so on. Then we started talking, and one thing led to the next and to the next. Turns out that our grandfathers were brothers from the same place in Ukraine! We have several medical conditions in common as well as the same perverse, dry sense of humor (with no olive). Leave it to genetics!

She was able to get some verification in her family of the existence of another brother from older relatives still living. I have no one in my family still living whom I could even ask; however, it appears that my grandfather married my grandmother and essentially left his family to become part of hers, so no one ever knew anything about his family of origin. He also died long before I was born. I’ve tried researching, to no avail. The end result, though, is that I have a second cousin on my mother’s side of the family living next door!

In the past month, my phone rang one day, and a woman asked me if I were me, that is, verifying my name. When I replied that I was, she then gave me the names of my parents and siblings, which I confirmed. A drawn out “Oh my God!” followed. She’s a cousin with whom I’d been very close when we were youngsters. When adulthood beckoned, we went our respective adult ways and lost track of each other. It turns out that we moved to TV around the same time five years ago, and who knows how often we might have crossed paths without realizing it!

The real question is how she found me. We have friends around the corner from us with names nearly the same as ours, both given names and surnames. She had reason to go to the Villages phone book to look up their address, and they’re not listed. However, where she expected to find their name, she found mine…. What are the chances of that happening?! Even though her father was older than my father, he was my father’s nephew. (Don’t ask….) Thus, she and I are first cousins once removed, according to Hoyle (or the Hoyle of Genealogy), on my Dad’s side of the family, living but a few minutes away.

Among our closest friends here in TV are a couple from the next town from us up north. There we have many friends in common, similar interests, similar viewpoints, similar volunteer activities. Yet we never met up north; it took coming to TV for that to happen! Go figure….

And speaking of up north, we come from a tiny town in New York State that's so small that people who live there don't even know where they are! But that didn't stop us from buying our home from a couple from the same town, which was not the basis for our finding the house! They lived a mile and a half from us, and in fact she served as our notary many decades ago....

Some may find it eerie; to me this kind of thing happens all the time, and in my way of thinking, there’s no such thing as a coincidence. I’ve run into friends and family members in places as diverse as Homer, Alaska; Sydney, Australia; and (Come Back to) Sorrento on the Amalfi coast of Italy. Talk about closing circles--and in such a unique way! Next maybe we should compare blood types?

Anyone ever buy a house in TV only to find your EX-spouse lives next door or down the street...that would be my :censored: luck.

Mom and I was riding in the car with the our realtor one day. He knew we were from Michigan. I mentioned that I had retired from a job in DC. He mentioned that his childhood friend from Kentucky now worked in DC and asked if I knew him. I couldn't believe that I did! Our offices worked closely together.

The funny thing was his friend's boss, who is now retired and lives in Florida, referred the realtor to me. The boss didn't have a clue that the two were childhood friends until I told her. She was able to connect them again. Small world indeed!