Genealogy is an unending source of coincidence, as my sisters and I first learned early in our research. “Back in the day”, my sisters and I took an annual trip together. One year, we decided to go to Connecticut for genealogical research.
Most of “us kids” had been born in Meriden, as had our father. Mom was born in Waterbury, and our grandparents were from Meriden and Hartford. Hartford, being the capital, has the widest variety of records so we decided to stay there. At the time, I was discovering travel guides, and decided we should stay at a hotel in Hartford at 440 Asylum Street. Cindy was eagerly exploring the new world of Internet travel research and decided that the best place for us to stay was a hotel at — you guessed it! — 440 Asylum Street.
In Hartford, across the parking lot from our hotel, was a beautiful old brick and marble train station. We had learned from Nana’s birth certificate that her father had worked for a company which made train equipment, so we looked forward to touring something that may have been existence in his day. We thoroughly enjoyed our first day at the State Library in Hartford, and talked it over well into the night. That is when we discovered that: 1. you should never assume anything, 2. ask “stupid” questions even when you know the answer, and 3. read all documents carefully.
Here is why you should: 1. Never assume. Most of us kids were very little (two of us yet unborn) when Nana died in 1952. She was born, lived, and was buried in Hartford, so we assumed we could pick up her death certificate while we were there. They couldn’t find it.
2. Ask “stupid” questions even when you know the answer: We knew she died in Hartford, even though we had never actually “asked” anyone. So that night we were discussing it, when my oldest sister said, “Well she died at the hospital in Dover. She was staying with us at the farm (in Sangerville)!” We never thought to ask each other family history questions. We sent my husband to the town office to get her death certificate and fax it to us in Hartford.
3. Read documents carefully: We received the fax from the hotel office and studied her death certificate; we then looked again at her birth certificate. That’s when we discovered that the address at which her father had worked producing train equipment was – wait for it – 440 Asylum Street.
Now if you have read this document carefully you may recall the point of this article was coincidences, and the coincidence of my sister and I using two “new-to-us” methods and coming up with the same hotel was quite a coincidence in a city as large and hotel-filled as Hartford is. But for the site of that hotel to be exactly where our great-grandfather worked in the 1880s is what I call Extreme Genealogical Serendipity!
To this day I sometimes relive the excitement and wonder of that moment of discovery.
