Long Lost Family

Great-great-great-great-...-grandpa!

I have family! Or, rather, more family than I thought.

I received a call last week from a woman who, it seems, is a second cousin on my father's side. She stumbled across us in the search for her family tree. Because my paternal grandmother died long before I was born, and because she had emigrated more or less by herself, we having had any contact with that branch of the family expect for one short visit that my father made to an uncle back in the 1970s (pre-me). But there they are. Some of them apparently came to the U.S. a while back, and others have come to visit, seeing cities that I happened to be living in at the time. It is very strange to think that I could have bumped into a lady in the train station and then walked away utterly unaware that I had just come closer to a paternal cousin than ever before.

On the other hand, I recently saw a paper that claims that each unique person on this planet is related to me (and every other person, for that matter) in 40,000 ways. So I guess I probably bump into second cousins thrice removed or something like that nearly every day ...