#52Ancestors - Week 37 - Closest to your birthday

In 2015 I wrote a post with the above title where I used Family Tree Maker to locate family members with a birth date close to mine. I found five family members with a birthday either side of my birthday - a cousin, John Smith, Mary Farley, James Roberts and Thomas Sutcliffe.

John Smith (1800-1885) was my great x3 grandfather. He was born on July 26 1800 in Marylebone, London and migrated to New South Wales in the 1850s. The other people with birthdays close to mine, apart from my cousin, were either great aunts or great uncles going back many generations.

However other coincidences in dates can be found when investigating families.

• In my immediate family 27 is a significant number as three of us have birthdays on the 27th of different months.


• When I was shown the baby book my mother-in-law kept when my husband was a baby I noticed that he was baptised in England on the day I was born in Australia.


• Some years ago a meeting was arranged for us to meet the parents of my son's fiancee. As we enjoyed morning tea the discussion, not surprisingly, turned to weddings. However we were all surprised when we realised that both sets of parents had married on exactly the same day. Robin and I were married in the morning while Larry and Ann were married in the afternoon. Now that is a family coincidence.

It would be interesting, one day, to have time to do a study to locate other statistical idiosyncrasies.