Family connections 1 + 2 + 3

1. My second marriage is to a former mature student with whom I had no prior connection. She was born in the UK whereas I spent my first 20 plus years in South Africa and subsequently lived and worked in London. Sometime after being together we discovered that her first cousin and his wife in Canada had been having fertility treatment with my first cousin, a fertility expert, long before I met my wife. My cousin also grew up in South Africa and eventually emigrated to Canada in his late 20s. (Other detail not publicised here because for obvious reasons). 2. Also links emerging from my marriage. My wife has a second cousin in South Africa whose first marriage broke down. She eventually remarried and we met her husband-to-be on a visit to Cape Town. It turned out that her husband was the cousin of a South African whom I met for the first time in London and with whom I had shared a flat in north London, many years previously, when I was a fairly recent arrival in the UK. 3. At the same dinner in the mid 90s, attended by some friends of the cousin's husband to be, were total strangers to us, but who it turned, out lived or had worked in a small town in South Africa (Queenstown), which was where my mother had stayed at a hotel with her aunt on her arrival from eastern Europe in the late 1930s. These other diner guests also knew of the hotel.