People and Places

This story involves several coincidences in which a village in Gloucestershire features. My husband and I moved to the said village several years ago from north Lancashire following a change of employment by my husband. We had no previous knowledge of this village, indeed we had never heard of it until we started house hunting. Some years later we bumped into a couple who had lived in the same very small village in Lancashire who had recently also moved to our village in Gloucestershire. I had known the wife in Lancashire (we were in the same choir) but we were not close friends by any means and certainly had not kept in touch. It was a massive surprise to find them living a few minute's walk away. But the coincidences do not end there. A few years ago our younger daughter obtained a lectureship at Oxford University (having taken her first and higher degrees at Cambridge and with no prior Oxford connections) and became a Fellow of of one of the colleges. [This in itself is a coincidence since we have discovered that some of my husband's direct ancestors lived, in the late nineteenth century, very close to where this college is located.] It transpires that the founder of this college had very close family connections with our village. Also a well-known alumna of the college lives here. And it turns out that the mother of the neighbour from Lancashire who 'followed' us to Gloucestershire was also a student at the college!