Genealogy 101

Sometime in the 1990s, I had never done any genealogy research on my family. One day I was in my local library in Florida, which had a modest genealogy section. I began to browse the genealogy stacks at random with the intent of becoming familiar with the available genealogy resources. About the second document I picked up was an unbound collection of photocopied pages stapled together entitled A Compilation of the Descendants of [omitted] and [redacted]. I had never heard of any family connection to those surnames. However, I opened it up at random, and saw my mother's name! She was one of those descendants. So, in my first five minutes as a genealogist, seven generations of my ancestry were revealed. This was not a local hometown document. It was from Georgia and mostly about Georgia and I was in Florida. I proceeded to photocopy the pages so I would have it at home. On getting home with the copy, I saw a faint image of an address label on the title page. It was the name and address of my great Aunt in Atlanta! She was dead at that point, so I was not able to ask her how this came to be. Apparently, she had possession of a previous copy of this document at one time. She had never said anything about genealogy to my mom or to me. I can only suppose that she had sent a copy of this document to my local library in the hope that we would become interested in genealogy sooner or later and find it. If so, it worked! Why she wouldn't have sent us a copy directly I don't know. --- This is amazing first because of my luck in finding such a document so easily, and second because of the mysterious connection to my aunt. I could have browsed hundreds of documents, even in that small library without finding something like that. If my Aunt deliberately sent the document to my local library, that lessens the coincidence by making it more probable that the document would exist in my library in the first place.