An amusing anecdote: A number of genealogy groups now have Facebook pages. In some of these groups, people post the surnames they are seeking and the locations where these families lived. My mother’s mother’s family is from Pueblo, Colorado—also my own birthplace—so I joined the Jewish genealogy group in Colorado.

I now live in Massachusetts and can only participate virtually, so a few weeks ago I posted the surnames I was looking for on the groups Facebook page. A kind member of the group, a woman I’ll call G__, offered to put me in contact with a friend of hers in Denver, a man I’ll refer to as L__, who was originally from Pueblo and knew the Jewish community there well.

Yesterday, I received a Facebook message from G__ reporting that L__ did indeed know a family with these surnames, and that he happened to run into a couple from this family at the park. When he told them someone was looking for people with a family name shared by them, they were very excited. G__ mentioned that the wife’s mother was still living, and that I should get in touch with her, as she remembered a great deal about the families

But when I read the couple’s names, I could only laugh… G__ must not have told L__ my name, or he must not have relayed it to the couple, because I’m sure that if he had, they would have told him that they knew me, and that the wife had in fact grown up in the same household as my mother, her first cousin, and that my grandmother and her mother had lived either in the same house or next door to each other until my grandmother’s death in the 1980s. As it turns out, L__ was well acquainted with my grandmother and even knew my mother.

The moral of the story: Even on social media, it’s a small world—at least, if you are talking about a Jewish family from Colorado.

Postscript: I was sorry to disappoint my family, so to soften the blow, I called my great aunt right away to tell her that I was the mystery relative.