Cambridge Coincidences Collection

DISCOVERING LOST FAMILY by Lauren Agnelli of Chester, CT My father’s side of the family, the Agnellis, were by nature not an outgoing or friendly bunch, so by the time my father died in 1974 at the young age of 43, we never heard from any of them except our beloved great Aunt Toots and Uncle Ambie -- who had always been regular visitors. So the only other Agnellis we knew of were our father, his two brothers, his dad and his mom, our grandparents. By 1974, half of them were gone, and the two brothers never stayed in touch after grandpa’s death and so. . .

I go to an out-of-state college and, while my hometown has it’s own university, it isn’t well-known and the attendance is very low. Only 2 people from my entire hometown go to the college I attend currently, which has something like 60,000 students. That being said, no one has heard of my hometown unless they’re a professor. At my first college party, I walked up to a random person and started talking to her. She said she had just transferred and I asked from where. It turns out she transferred from my hometown college!

One time a new friend was talking about how she tries to write down all of her friends’ birthdays and asked for mine. Joking around, I told her to guess. Lo and behold she guessed it right without any hints. Then she told me I had to guess hers and I also guessed hers right! We had never had conversations about birthdays before and there was no way for her to find out my birthday before this conversation. We didn’t even know each other’s star signs or birth seasons and we both randomly guessed each other’s birthdays right within a minute of each other.

As a child, my friends and I came up with this very specific make believe world for us to play pretend at recess. It had something to do superheroes and each villain we fought had a backstory etc, etc. Cut to 20 years later, I was talking to my girlfriend at the time and she mentioned playing a game that was way too similar to mine to be an accident. It turns out that, even though we went to different kindergartens a town apart, she had a friend who played with my group one time and brought the game to their playground too.