Meeting after 147 years

Families meet unexpectedly after 147 years and 10,600 miles apart In July 1980 I was with my husband, Philip O, and our thirteen-year-old daughter in the nave of Westminster Abbey, examining the memorial of James O (1715–1769), when we were approached by a couple from Australia who asked Philip if he could translate the Latin on the brass for them. Robert and Addie O were visiting England hoping to find out more about their family. Realising that we were related and astonished that we should have been visiting the memorial at exactly the same time, we invited the couple to join us in Cambridge a few days later. Philip was able to show them a detailed family tree and explain that neither he nor Robert were direct descendants of James O in the Abbey but that they did share an ancestor, William O (1744–1823), who was a first cousin of James. William had four sons; the second, John (1788–1848), was Robert’s great great grandfather. The fourth son, also named William (1795–1876), was Philip’s great great grandfather. We own photographs of portraits of these two brothers, so were able to show Robert a picture of John, whose son, also named John (born in 1814), had emigrated to Sydney in 1833. The Australian Os knew almost nothing about their family before this date and the English Os knew nothing about the family in Australia. On 16 July 1980 the two parts of the family tree were united! As a result of this re-examination of the family tree we realised that a few years earlier our daughter had attended the same small primary school in Cambridge as Thomas Matthew O, born in 1973, who, like our newly found relative, Robert, was a direct descendant of William’s second son, John. Thomas’s family have John’s portrait. Our son, Christopher, has William’s portrait hanging in his living room. Janet O