Family Ties
Blood is thicker than water, but even watered-down blood can be pretty thick … Today I discovered a branch of my family I knew nothing about. It’s again proof of how small Jamaica is.
I was sitting in a meeting for work where I had just done a presentation. The chair of the meeting asked me the spelling of my name, just to double-check. Given the unusual spelling (’lds’ instead of ‘lls’), the girl next to me (Daphne) leaned over to ask where my family was from because her grandmother shared my last name!!
After the meeting I put her on to my father who confirmed some of her thoughts about the location, so she declared she was going to talk to her aunt who is their family historian. Before lunchtime she got back to me very excited that their was indeed some connection and insisting that I call her aunt as soon as I could.
That conversation happened later in the evening and found me talking to an effusive Aunty Pearl who turned out to be first cousin to my grandfather. Which basically means that Daphne’s aunt’s mother and my father’s father’s father were brother and sister. 
To simplify - her grandmother and my great-grandfather were siblings.
Now obviously this is a very distant connection but given that I know practically nothing of my grandfather’s side of the family, it was pretty interesting. Aunty Pearl is hoping that we keep in touch and we will see how that goes. But it is nice knowing that to some people blood is blood no matter how dilute.
