A Gorgeous Summer Day in NYC

Yes, I know yesterday was Spring, but the heat continues and it's beginning to feel like Summer.

Today was astonishing because I met a cousin I hadn't ever seen before. Technically, he's my half-cousin, because he and I share a grandmother but not a grandfather. He's one year older than I, and he and his wife took up amateur genealogy as a hobby when they retired several years ago. That's how they found me, thanks to the explosion of information available on the Internet.

We spend a fascinating four hours together discovering that we had both graduated from college the same year, both majored in Math, and his wife's best high school friend was in my class in college. I also learned that I had lived for the years 1971-1985 in the next town from our grandmother's grave, and not known it. Neither one of us knows what Polish town she was born in, but we do know that she had one maiden name and three married names but only two husbands (one at a time), because her second husband (not my grandfather) changed his name when he moved from Poland to Liverpool, and she sometimes used his Polish name and sometimes his English one. I wish I could ask her what circumstances dictated which name she used, and amillion other questions.