Canuck

  Monday, 30 May 2005

How the Web is Amazing, Part IX < 11:09:55 PM>.

Back in October I posted this photo from Disnik, Croatia in this space. Last night a man named Ivan living in Ecuador happened to be searching Google for "Disnik," came across the photo and left this comment about how we might be related.

This morning I emailed Ivan with some information about our family, and an hour later he emailed me back "Yeahhh we are family."

It turns out that we share the same great-grandfather, making us second cousins. Ivan's branch of the family moved to Peru after World War II, my branch moved to Canada in the 1920s and, with the exception of a visit to Peru by my grandfather in the 1970s, we'd heard nothing from Peru, and assumed that contact with family there was lost forever.

By lunch this afternoon, Ivan and I were having a Skype chat, Charlottetown to Ecuador, filling each other in on the last 75 years of family history.

It's a small, small, small world after all.