Last October, I wrote about an extraordinary wedding record I discovered for my maternal grandmother, Mary Koss. This year, Grandma Mary, who we called Non, managed to do it again and the unsettling circumstances surrounding it make this one a perfect example of synchronicity.
In April, I contacted a Croatian court-appointed translator to handle the translation and apostille process for my family’s vital records as part of our dual-citizenship applications. The translator had originally been recommended by the Croatian consulate, and we had corresponded briefly the previous fall.
Then…nothing.
After three unanswered emails over the course of three and a half weeks, I contacted the consulate again requesting another recommendation. Their reply was brief: they were no longer providing names. After being thoroughly ghosted, I could understand why.
Fortunately, a former client who had completed the process a year earlier gave me the name of a translator in Split. The response this time was immediate and professional. The pricing was reasonable, the turnaround time was clear, and after a few emails back and forth, I sent payment through an international bank transfer.
About a week later, I received an email from DHL Express containing a waybill tracking number for the return shipment of my documents. (See above)
That’s when things became strange.
The shipment notification listed the wrong street address, the wrong zip code, and typed in ominous capital letters, the city of GARY.
I do not live in Gary, Indiana.
I’ll admit it: I panicked.
My original documents were apparently somewhere in international transit headed to the wrong place. I immediately searched online maps to see whether the mysterious street existed either in my own city or in Gary. It did not.
The zip code error at least made sense. I had accidentally mistyped it in an earlier email but quickly sent a correction afterward. The translator later admitted she had overlooked the follow-up and used the earlier message instead. That explained the zip code.
It did not explain the street name.
And it certainly did not explain GARY.
I contacted the translator, who was just as confused as I was. Her paperwork showed neither the incorrect street name nor the city of Gary. Concerned, she returned to the DHL office in person. The clerk checked their system and was equally baffled. According to DHL’s records, the strange address information simply did not exist in their computer system.
Yet it certainly existed in the email I received.
For privacy reasons, I removed the house number and waybill information from the image above, but the bizarre street name and city remain exactly as they appeared.
Sure, technology glitches happen. Addresses become corrupted. Autofill creates odd errors. But what makes this incident feel especially unsettling is the particular combination of the street name and the city itself.
My grandmother moved to Gary in 1919 as a teenage bride and lived there until 1973, when she relocated to Florida after her oldest daughter was transferred there for work. Grandma never cared much for Florida, so two years later she moved again, this time to Arizona, where her youngest daughter lived. The desert climate didn’t suit her either, and eventually she returned once more to Florida.
A few years later, she developed Alzheimer’s disease.
Her children had promised they would never place her in a nursing home, so she moved in with her middle daughter in Pennsylvania. When that daughter became ill, Grandma was relocated once again to Arizona, where her youngest daughter left her job to care for her full time.
Grandma died in Arizona.
But her body was brought home for burial in, you guessed it, Gary.
As for the mysterious street name? Hidden Way Drive.
There is no such street connected to my city, nor to Gary. Yet somehow those words appeared in connection with documents tied directly to my Croatian ancestry and my grandmother’s family line.
“Hidden Way.”
Honestly, that is just creepy enough to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
Was it merely a bizarre technological glitch? A random collision of data somewhere deep in DHL’s system? Perhaps.
Or maybe Grandma was finding one more way to remind me that genealogy often refuses to stay neatly inside the boundaries of logic.
Sometimes the past nudges back.
And sometimes, I like to think, our ancestors let us know they approve.
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