family coincidence discovered after meeting my wife

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understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

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When I met my wife (that's another story all together about how that happened!), we fell for one another immediately. It was like lightning bolts had struck us both. I couldn't wait to get to know her and asked her out immediately. We went to dinner the day we met and started talking about family. I was living in Maryland at the time (that is where we met) and she was working for a company in Arkansas. She was passing through my area on sales calls. When we started discussing our personal stories at dinner, she asked me where my parents were living. I told her that they lived in a small rural farm town in southern Illinois that she had probably never heard of. That town was Mount Vernon, Illinois.....where my future wife grew up and went to High School. Her parents were currently still living there (as were mine), and my parents and grandparents had lived in that same small town for many years. Generations of both of our families were intertwined in that rural community. I knew the town very well from so many visits there in the past. We knew all the places there and had many stories to share of our youths that were similar or nearly identical, as I had visited my Grandparents during many summers growing up and worked on their farm with them. We knew everything there was to know about this tiny town and it's history. We even 'hung out" at a lot of the same places as young kids and teenagers. Weird..... So....our parents and families turned out to be living in the same obscure, rural little farm town in southern Illinois. We probably grew up passing one another on the sidewalks, but never met until that fateful day in Maryland. We were married within a year and have been happily married now for almost 25 years.
Total votes: 360
Date submitted:Sat, 19 Jan 2019 13:23:04 +0000Coincidence ID:10185