It seems that eventually, every one of us will get some bizarrely personal reminder that the world isn’t as large as it seems to us.
As we’ve seen multiple times, it’s entirely possible to go through life and discover that you have a secret family member . And if you meet someone who looks exactly like you, you’ve either got this incredible possibility to deal with or a similarly mind-blowing coincidence on your hands.
But as one woman recently discovered when she was trying to reunite someone with a long-lost item, these bizarre coincidences can still happen even when the family connection is a little more tenuous.
Since late July, a woman named Chelsey Brown has been using her TikTok account to document her journey of returning lost heirlooms to their families.
As she explained in a video , she does this by combing through flea markets for items that look like they have sentimental value and using the genealogy knowledge she picked up from her father to track down any living relatives or descendants.
As she told Insider, “Now I try and thrift at least three items per week that I can trace back to a family member.”
But since she wasn’t able to glean anything from one photo album from 1927 she uncovered, she got her dad involved directly this time.
And after hours of going through hundreds of family trees together, the duo found a promising lead to the owner’s family name of Morton in a 1930 census.
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But while that was likely satisfying in and of itself, the hard-won family name led Brown to an even more stunning revelation.
Namely, that the person who once owned this photo album was apparently a distant cousin of hers.
Sure, there are a lot of degrees of separation when we’re talking about fourth or sixth cousins, but that doesn’t make the fact that a random item she came across in a flea market led her to newly discovered relative any less staggering.
And while the video you’re about to see doesn’t make this clear, it seems that the woman has since found original owner’s descendant.
Brown told Insider that this person doesn’t want her name out there, but the distant cousin has since kept in touch with her and is excited and grateful to have the photo album back.
This really only happens once in a lifetime!
h/t: Insider
