I woke up the other day to an email from a woman I’d never heard of before. The subject line said “Is it really you?” and I came pretty close to throwing it straight into the spam bucket.
She said she was my godmother, that she’d lost touch with my mother after they’d moved to Australia, and gave details of being at my parents’ wedding. Thirty-five years later, she’d decided to do a web search for my original surname (Quinlem) and found me.
It’s all true. Wow.
I mean, seriously, like WOW.
4 replies on “Amazing email”
Wow is right. How lovely that the web brought her into your life again. I’ve got a similar story twice repeated. Except it was me doing the reaching out. One, I searched for my family name “Staneland” and followed up any lead. Found a family in England that shares the same name and hence the same great-great grandfather! i.e. my great grandfather and their great grandfather were brothers. Another one is a cousin that lives in South Africa. All I recalled was that her dad was shot and killed due to his anti-apartheid stance and his name. Found a website by his daughter and contacted her and after a few back-and-forths have established that her grandpa and my grandma were brother/sister. So, like WOW, amazing. Great news to hear that. Bravo for not deleting it.
Before I went to the States last year I tried tracking down a long lost friend (my daughter’s namesake as she was with me when I gave birth to my youngest daughter whilst living in LA). Had no luck with her surname (Smith of all things!) so I then tried her friend who had a more unusual name and lo and behold I immediately got about 20 possible hits through Google. I emailed her asking if by any chance she was a friend from 20 years ago and the ecstatic reply was yes. As a result of this I was able to catch up and spend a week with both of them whilst I was in the States and I had the most amazing time. The net just overwhelms me sometimes with how fantastic the technology is.
That is so awesome!
Really cool, must admit, with a subject line like that, I think my spam filters would have binned it, maybe it’s time to re-think them.