Clip of one of my many FamilySearch.org emails

This is the 5th blog in my personal synchronicity series. If you find what I’ve written weird, I will definitely agree with you. I can’t make stuff like this up!

I had put genealogy on a back burner with the move and after July 5^th, temporarily stopped accepting clients. My last day of research in Tampa had been a duesy! I started at the Circuit Court looking for property records and found a very interesting document for my Client. I was going to then go to the University of South Florida, on the other end of town, to look at funeral home records. I decided it would be nice if I took pictures of the former home and business of the Client’s grandfather since I had to pass them anyway.

I was turning onto Florida Avenue and looking for an address that had been changed over the years. I was trying to judge the location I needed from a business that had been in the same place. Out of nowhere, a car was on my tail so I quickly turned into the first drive I saw. I stopped at the side of the building and determined the place I was looking for was directly across the street.

As I got out of the car I noticed a man looking at me with a confused expression on his face. I decided to let him know I was a family historian who was only going to park for a second to take a picture for someone who lived in New England and whose grandpa used to live across the street. The man said, “And then you’re going to take care of your flat.”

Huh? What flat? Evidently, I had turned so quickly that I hit a sharp spot on a curb and sliced open my front passenger-side tire. Oh no! I was supposed to be at USF in 15 minutes. I am not good at changing tires. The man understood my panicked look and said it was a good thing it happened where it did. What was he talking about?

Turns out I did this in front of a tire store. Weirder still, the Client’s grandfather had owned a tire store and I had just taken a picture of that building. The kind man put on my spare and I made it just a few minutes late to my next appointment.

When I got home I told hubby what happened and he said he was glad as he had meant to tell me he was concerned that my tires would not make the long trip from Florida to Indiana. We had new tires put on the following day. Someone in the universe was definitely looking out for me!

Our oldest adult child closed on their new home at the end of July while we were all still in Florida. Since there is a law in Indiana that sellers have a week AFTER closing to move out, we all decided not to move out of our Florida home until we knew their new home would be unoccupied. We didn’t have a lot of time as we would be closing on our Florida home later in the week.

We decided that we would all drive up to Indiana on August 1^st. Accept, things don’t always go as planned. Hubby was going to drive a U-Haul but our youngest decided at the last minute not to drive my husband’s car up. We left hubby’s car at the realtor’s home until we had unpacked the Pods in Indiana, with the idea we would fly back to Florida and then drive the car up.

We thought it would be a great idea if the rest of us left in the middle of the night – not many people on the road and cooler temperatures for the wheels. We packed my car and our eldest’s car. A few minutes later we discovered our eldest’s car had a flat tire. Hubby decided he would leave in the middle of the night and the oldest and I would remain to get the tire fixed and then head out. We ended up leaving Florida at about 10 AM on August 1^st instead of midnight. Those 10 hours made a huge difference!

It was a horrendous drive. There was smoke in Florida from a brush fire that made visibility poor. The check engine lights came on; we almost ran out of gas in Atlanta as we were stuck in a major traffic jam during rush hour. The tire light came on and we had difficulty finding a tire store open at 6 PM. Turns out, the tires were just overheated and after waiting an hour, we were back on our way. There was road construction through the mountains of Tennessee. It rained through all of Kentucky and it was now dark again. We also were traveling with 4 cats between us and they were starting to lose it after 12 hours, barely halfway in our journey. And it was unbearably hot, at 10 PM in Tennessee it was still in the 90s. Our car air conditioners were struggling.

We made it driving straight through, driving for 20 hours. The following two weeks were a blur of remotely closing on our Florida home, dealing with Pods, flying back to Florida, and then driving back to Indiana again.

By the middle of August I was exhausted, bruised from lifting boxes, and really missing genealogy. I had my laptop and decided to pull it out and check my email.

Sure, there was lots of spam, missed sales, and several emails from FamilySearch.org.

I don’t know about you but I don’t get a lot of mail from FamilySearch, maybe monthly. But there were lots of emails notifying me of new finds. All of the discoveries were in regard to my Leininger and Landfair lines. These were the folks who I was now following in their footsteps by relocating to where they once lived.

In the many years that I’ve had a FamilySearch account, I only recall receiving one email about a Leininger find. Why was I suddenly getting all of these notices now?

I have no idea. Perhaps the spirits were trying to use the internet to let me know that they were glad I had returned to Indiana. Perhaps not.

Next week I’ll be writing two book reviews about synchronicity.  Happy Halloween!

October Genealogical Coincidences Part 4

Photo by Lori Samuelson This fourth Saturday of October brings another strange story that personally happened to me in July. As I’ve previously blogged, our family decided to relocate from Florida to Indiana and our house went up for sale online on June 29th. By July 1st we had a bidding war and then, both parties decided to walk away from the contract by July 8th. This was a problem as my husband and oldest child had flown to Indiana the weekend of July 4th and we had a contract on another home. My husband and I decided to cancel our contract until we found a new buyer. A few hours after the second contract was cancelled I received a call from our realtor informing me we had a new contract on our home. I told him that was impossible as it had only been shown to two people. He insisted the person who placed the contract had seen it. I didn’t want to call someone a liar but clearly, a tour hadn’t happened. I told the realtor I wanted an open house on Sunday and I thought we should accept back up offers, given what had just occurred. He agreed and said he was going to verify with the purchaser’s realtor to find out when the person had seen the house. I got a call about a half hour later, at 11 PM. Our realtor said I better sit down. “What now?” I thought. The realtor said the man had seen the outside of the home as he and his wife had stayed in my city during the pandemic and he often visited the park across the street from our home. So, the man wasn’t lying exactly. He had seen the exterior but not the interior; he viewed the interior through the internet. I told the realtor I really wanted him to see the interior in person before we signed the contract as that was the problem with the first two that fell through; one spouse came and wanted it and when the other spouse was brought back, he didn’t. The realtor agreed and said the man had a flight the next day and he would see it in late afternoon. I asked where he was flying in from. “Chicago,” said the realtor. My husband and I are originally from the Chicago area so that surprised me; most of the new residences of our then city was arriving from the mid-Atlantic states. The realtor said there was more . . . the man was from the same small town my husband had been born and raised in. Wow, what a coincidence, I thought. But of course, that wasn’t all. When we looked at the contract we realized the man lived on the street we used to drive on as teenagers to go to the Lake Michigan beach. There were many beaches we could have used but this beach was considered “our” beach. He lived only 3 blocks from where we used to park. Stranger, still, I somehow recognized his name. Since my high school annuals were packed, I went on Ancestry.com to check out the yearbook database. Sure enough, I went to high school with a guy with his name. Turns out, he wasn’t the same person. The purchaser visited the next day and was shocked when he saw that we have a painting of the town in which he lived that my sister-in-law had bought my husband years ago. We bought our home from an architect who designed it; he, too, was an architect. This deal went through and it went quickly – in 3 weeks. I mentioned in a previous blog one of our reasons for relocating was because we couldn’t get our insurance coverage increased. Because he was purchasing it, he was able to get fully insured. He is only going to live in the house for 6 months of the year and go back to his other home for the rest of the time. This made us feel good; he will definitely be someone who will keep the home we put so much effort into in good condition. So, what does this synchronistic event mean in my life? Jessica Estrada’s blog, “No, It’s Not Just a Coincidence…” suggests that synchronicity “… is an event where needs are met, people are encountered, or things just come together perfectly when we need them. In other words, being in the right place at the right time.” The house was definitely meant for him and to interpret my cousin Shakespeare saying all the world’s a stage, us players have all gone around the playhouse. My father’s family relocated from Ft. Wayne to northwestern Indiana. My husband and I relocated from northwestern Indiana to Florida. The purchaser follows us to Florida while we move to the Ft. Wayne area where my father’s family had started out. Full circle. There’s one more Saturday in October and I’ll finish the month out with one more strange story. Or, perhaps, two – strange occurrences seem to be my destiny this year!

October Genealogical Coincidences Part 3

Photo Courtesy of Lori Samuelson 15 October 2022 The month of October is moving along and I have another strange personal story to share with you. In June, my husband and I decided we were going to relocate from Florida to Indiana. We had lived in our home for 18 years so we had a lot of stuff. Summer in Florida is not the time to have a garage sale. We decided we would just pack everything up and squeeze it into Pods. We called it playing Big Jenga. I helped our oldest pack up their home as they had also sold and was going to relocate. I had gotten the inside of our homes boxed fairly quickly but I really dreaded the garage. In Florida, basements are rare because the water table is so close to the surface. Many subdivisions do not permit sheds so the garage becomes the catch all place for everything that has no other room to go. Ours was packed as our youngest had moved home at the start of the pandemic so their household items were also out there. If that wasn’t bad enough, we had been getting a lot of rain so the mosquitos were in full force. It was a hot, dirty, itchy job. And then there was the attic! We had two small attic accesses that contained items that we couldn’t part with but didn’t know what to do with, like my grandmother’s old wooden ironing board, a folding student desk with an inkwell we once acquired at an auction, our kids’ old treasures, and something I had totally forgot we had – my dad’s wooden toolbox. Actually, the toolbox was my grandfathers and my dad had it passed to him. He had given it to me years ago and asked me to pass it on to any son’s I might have. At the time, I didn’t have any. So, it had been forgotten in the attic. My husband was in the attic and I was on the ladder, grabbing the items he was handing d0wn. I lost my grip on the toolbox and it fell to the floor. Thankfully, it didn’t shatter but it did come apart slightly where the old glue had given way. I opened the box to see if the contents were ruined. What I found made me gasp. My husband, still in the attic, asked me what was wrong. I was speechless, which is rare for me. My husband asked me if I was alright. I said yes, with tears in my eyes. He came down the ladder to find out what was going on. I was holding a brittle yellow newspaper that had been stuffed in the toolbox. I don’t recall ever seeing it before. The headline was meaningless to me and the paper was dated 1933. I knew where my father was living that year, in Lake County, Indiana, where he was attending high school. The newspaper, however, was from Fort Wayne, Allen County, Indiana. It was the area where we were relocating to. Although it was insufferably hot in that garage I got the cold shivers on my neck. I knew my paternal grandfather relocated to Ft. Wayne in the mid-1960s but he certainly wasn’t there in 1933. I have yet to learn who in the Leininger family was in Ft. Wayne at that time or why that particular page was placed in the toolbox. What I do know is if I hadn’t been a klutz and dropped it, I might not have ever found that newspaper. I have no idea what the universe was trying to tell me but I felt that my ancestors were sending me a message that our relocation was the right decision. Times were tough during the 1930s and our move was not a fun experience for any of us. What we were going through, however, paled in comparison to the experiences my ancestors lived through during the Great Depression. And weirdly enough, the newspaper is now back in the area where it once originated.

October Genealogical Coincidences Part 2

Courtesy of Psychologytoday.com

Yesterday, hubby and I visited his 1st and 2nd cousins who we have not seen for almost 50 years! After my coincidence series ends I'll be writing about ways to connect with family that has become disconnected. I think it will be helpful to you with the holidays approaching.

As Spooky October continues, here’s another synchronicity that I experienced in May.

I’ve blogged before about issues I was having with a lineage society that I have chosen to not name (Lineage Society Disappointments and Lineage Societies – What gives?!) I was going on three years waiting for a response if my paperwork was going to be accepted or not.

Initially,  the paperwork had been accepted but two weeks after I received a confirmation email and an invitation to attend the annual meeting, I was informed my acceptance was in error as I had not selected an individual that met the criteria for the organization. They also cashed my check for membership.

I asked if there was a list of accepted individuals and I was told there wasn’t. I then provided a few other possible candidates and was informed that one would work. After correcting the forms and resubmitting I waited three months and did not hear anything. I inquired by email if the paperwork had been reviewed. I was told that the genealogist was busy traveling and would let me know by the end of the month.

Another three months passed and I again emailed asking for an update. I was then informed that the genealogist had asked another genealogist to review the  application. I was told to be patient as that individual was extremely busy.

A year passed and I again asked. It was now the start of the pandemic and I was told that more documentation was needed. This was problematic, of course, since archives were closing around the world. I had two questions that needed a response. I could reply with proof for the first question but the second was more challenging. I submitted a response within three months which was amazing, considering I was trying to obtain documents from four countries in the late 1600-early 1700 time period during the global shutdown of archives.

Oddly, one of the organizations I reached out to for assistance was the same one that the genealogist had but I was conversing with a different individual. It turned out my contact’s wife happened to have the same individual in her family tree and he was interested to learn what I uncovered. I promised to share my findings, which I did.

Another year and a half passed and I heard nothing from the lineage society. I decided to reach out to the president of the organization who I knew from another society. She forwarded my email to a gentleman who had recently taken over for the genealogist that was handling my application.

He profusely apologized and said he had never received any of my paperwork when the position was turned over to him. No surprise there! He asked for me to send proof my check had been cashed as that was also not clear to the new treasurer. He gave me his phone number and asked that I call him.

I found my canceled check online and emailed it to him; then called as he had requested. When he answered I told him who I was and he replied, “Hi, Cuz.” Cuz? Turns out he is related to me on my father’s line as he noticed my maiden name on the application and several of the great greats I had included.

My application was approved and my newfound cousin and I have spoken and emailed several times. Here’s some additional weird stuff about us:

• He lived 50 miles from me in Florida for about 50 years
• He had just relocated out of Florida for the same reasons we were
• His new home is 50 miles from where my husband and I own property and considered moving
• We share very similar views about many things, history in particular
• I was writing an article about a Civil War myth purportedly that occurred in my former city and told him I was stuck on researching the man who was at the center of the story. He happened to be familiar with the man’s father, who was an early settler in Payne’s Prairie, close to where he lived most of his life.

I’m not sure what lesson I was supposed to learn from the universe but it does drive home the point that genealogy is a study of patience! If my application had been approved immediately I would likely never have connected with my “Cuz” nor obtained the information I needed to complete the article.

Next week – another creepy occurrence that happened to me in June.

October Genealogical Coincidences Part 1

Courtesy of PsychologyToday.com

Happy October! This is the month I reflect on the genealogical coincidences that I’ve personally experienced or heard about from clients in the past year. This year was a duesy for me!

Perhaps you don’t believe in synchronicity, defined by the Oxford Languages dictionary as “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection” and Google links these types of events as “incidents of spiritual significance.” The word was coined by psychiatrist Carl Jung; the law of synchronicity states we are attracted to people, places, and events that help us meaningfully evolve.

Even if you think the stories I’m about to relate this month are mere hocus pocus, I think that you’ll agree that they are odd occurrences. Strange – weird – even spooky!

Back in January, I blogged about my discovery of missing family photos that I thought I had scanned years ago (Scanned Your Photos? Think Again!). I related how a simple office reorganization project after I bought a new piece of office furniture made me aware of my paternal side’s photos disappearing from Google Photos. That led me to months of scanning diaries, letters, photos, certificates, and other documents that once belonged to our Indiana relatives.

My immediate family was tired of my project by March. Hubby had to constantly step over piles of items I was arranging for the scanner. I declined invitations from family and friends as I was obsessed with getting every item scanned and saved into Dropbox. I was constantly sneezing from the dusty brittle old papers but I forged on. I locked the office door when I wasn’t in there to keep the cats from messing up these precious papers.

I could not explain why I was so insistent that I had to finish by June 1^st. It was a self-imposed deadline that just popped into my head early on in the project. I tried to rationalize it as that was the first day of hurricane season in Florida where I was living. I dreaded the thought of a hurricane as we had lost everything once in Hurricane Elena in 1985. To lessen my anxiety, I reminded myself that my home did not even need flood insurance as it was high and dry by Florida standards. We had renovated and included every safety device, from the windows to the roof, to prevent storm damage (Home Renovations Then and Now and More Genealogy Tips Based on Renovation Musings). I decided I was just being irrational. Furthermore, in the unlikely event, I’d have to evacuate, at least I wouldn’t have to lug all these items with me.

In the middle of May, I was asked by the non-profit historical society in my city to attend an in-person conference given by my then-county preservation office. I was so excited as this was the first face-to-face conference I was going to since the pandemic. I assumed it was going to discuss the typical Florida preservation problems – mold, insects, and humidity. Instead, I learned that everything I thought I had done right to preserve my home was in vain. It was a sobering realization. Basically, an NOAA study from 2015 determined what my county would look like after a category 4-5 storm hit. Only two land masses would remain. The County’s plan, though the word plan is not accurate, was to have all of us attendees use a new FEMA App to record places that were of historical significance so when they were gone, the County would receive funds to build bridges between the remaining land masses to the mainland. No worries about remembering what the buildings had been like! A grant was given to a University of South Florida professor to make 3D videos of the sites so future generations could “visit” them.

It took me about an hour to realize this was not a sick joke. I had difficulty wrapping my head around the fact that, if my home survived, I would be living on an island. The traffic getting home from the conference further frustrated me as what should have taken a half hour took an hour and a half due to congestion, accidents, construction, and poor planning.

I didn’t say anything to my family that night as I thought I was in shock. I tried to tell myself I misunderstood. Being an optimist, I always thought the calvary would arrive and save us all from global warming which, interestingly, was never mentioned at all at the conference.

I began to research what I had heard and discovered that the elevation of Florida has radically changed in the past 20 years. I found the NOAA study and maps that confirmed what I had been told. It was time to share this with my family.

Initially, like me, my hubby was skeptical. He gently told me he’d like to do his own research. I encouraged him to do so. My main concern was our home and flood insurance policies. We were severely underinsured given that housing prices had skyrocketed and we had not increased our coverage since we purchased the home 18 years earlier.

By day's end, hubby let me know the research he had done had also rattled him. We decided to make a phone call the following day to our insurance agent. We also shared the information with our adult children. Both didn’t seem surprised and felt we should all relocate from the area. I was dead set against that. I loved my home and the city where I had planned to spend my remaining years. I even had my burial site paid off. It was already on Find-A-Grave. I was not going to go anywhere!

Well, that was until we had to deal with the insurance agency. First, we were laughed at. When we insisted that we wanted to raise coverage we were given one hurdle after another to jump through. We were told that we needed a Wind Mitigation Report that would cost $150.00. We reminded our agent that we had one in our file. Next, we were told that our file was empty. I had a copy so I emailed it. A week went by and we were told that the document was invalid because it was over 3 years old. We’ve yet to find any law that states that a new report must be done every 3 years. We had a recent report finished and submitted in a few days.

Meanwhile, our adult children kept needling us to leave Florida. Our oldest was so certain that we all were going to move that they began packing. The kids wanted us to make lists of what we were looking for in a new community. Hubby and I dragged our feet; the last insurance claim we had filed was years ago so we should have no problem increasing our coverage. Wrong again!

By early June we still had no response from the insurance agent. He was too busy that week, he took some time off, and he stopped returning phone calls and emails. In desperation, hubby showed up at his office in mid-June, receiving a promise that our report would be sent to the insurance company in the next few days, however, we were cautioned that it was up to the insurance company to determine how much coverage would be available to us and since we didn’t require flood insurance, we could only purchase the bare minimum which was far less than the home was worth.

We were beginning to lose hope so we decided to take a week to explore northeastern Indiana as a possible new home.

Why Indiana? Great question! It met all of our criteria for what we were looking for – available fresh water and food sources, jobs for the kids, hospitals as we age, plenty of outdoor activities, friendly people, historical preservation, and of course, genealogy opportunities. Plus, it has no hurricanes.

We know that no place is perfect so weather threats will always be possible though the risks are somewhat lessened where we moved.

On our excursion, we met so many Florida transplants who told us they understood completely why we were relocating. This was comforting as so many of our friends and neighbors in Florida thought we were crazy.

On the day that we flew back to Florida, our oldest received an offer on their home. They hadn’t even listed it for sale; the large offer came via a letter. I was certain it was a scam but it was not. They sold their home without having anyone do a physical walk-through; Zoom was used instead. We listed our home the following week with a realtor and it was sold in 48 hours. This was after the interest rates were raised and when, supposedly, the market was in a downturn.

The people who were purchasing our homes wanted us to move out quickly – in 3 weeks. How thankful I was that I had set a June 1^st deadline to finish scanning my genealogy. It was done, for the most part, boxed carefully and ready to move.

And that piece of furniture I had purchased in January to organize the office, at the store that day I couldn’t decide if I should also buy another matching piece but decided against it. This past week, as hubby and I walked through Joann’s he happened to see the furniture I hadn’t purchased. He remarked how we now had space in our new home and maybe we should get it. The store had one left in stock. I am happy to report our office is now fully organized! If someone had told me in January when I bought the first piece it would be 9 months and a major move until I finished reorganizing I wouldn’t have believed them.

We all know what happened to Florida this past week; my fears became reality. Although I am relieved that my former city was spared this time, I know we have made the right decision. Who would have thought that looking at an old family photo album and deciding to reorganize my office would have resulted in such a major upheaval in my life?

Another odd event happened to me in May that I’ll blog about next week. Until next time, Happy Hunting!