Stumbing upon people online without looking for them

February 12, 2006 5:05 PM

Remarkable human connections made possible through the web. Blogs, Flickr, etc. Not "love connections," but rather people who might have recognized an old relative in a photo, or a family member they never knew existed. Stumbling across each other, not searching. (more)

In particular, I recall a blog in which someone described some horrific WWII event in which someone gave up his life so that the blogger's relative might live. In the comments, a relative of the sacrificed man recognized the story and a remarkable connection was made.

(I am probably butchering this in recollection: sorry)

Anyone know what/where that was? Here's an ok example, from Liz Lawley's blog, about relatives in Brazil who found her by accident, searching their own names.

But I'm more interested in the kinds of things I've seen from time to time on Flickr -- "oh my god, that's my stepdad on that beach, the guy with the hat. We kicked him out of the house, and never saw him again, 10 years ago." I've seen this at least twice.

If anyone can point me to any such stories/records/events, I'd appreciate it -- it's for a lecture I'm preparing.

posted by cloudscratcher to computers & internet (24 comments total)

Here are a couple threads from my blog:

The Wreck of the Shenandoah led to comments from at least one eyewitness and later, a scan of a family photo of the event. There are also some really remarkable anecdotes in the comments.

I also linked to an OC Register story about Billl Mauldin before his death and for whatever reason, the comments became a bulletin board intended for Bill, whose family eventually found the thread:

Drop Bill Mauldin a Line; Mauldin Dead at 81; Mauldin Memorial Arrangements and Family Requests.
posted by mwhybark at 5:33 PM on February 12, 2006

A year ago I was poking around on Flickr and happened to see a picture of my child home in Utah. I just searched the tag 'utah' and it was the first result. I was pretty freaked out. Not all the dramatic of a story, but for me it was memorable.
posted by voidcontext at 5:40 PM on February 12, 2006

Also, a thread on Flickr Coincidences.
posted by voidcontext at 5:51 PM on February 12, 2006

I hadn't spoken to my old friend Jay Janskeski in over a decade (since I'd moved away from where the town where we went to high school), but I bumped into him here on Metafilter. The Internet had never had that "small world" feeling before that.
posted by kimota at 5:52 PM on February 12, 2006

Locally, there was this thread. As for flickr, this is a good start, along with the link in that post.
posted by duende at 5:57 PM on February 12, 2006

In particular, I recall a blog in which someone described some horrific WWII event in which someone gave up his life so that the blogger's relative might live. In the comments, a relative of the sacrificed man recognized the story and a remarkable connection was made.

It was a thread on one of the Kos diaries. The (Russian?) person who sacrificed his life in a POW camp had the first name Roman, and the American man who was saved named his son Roman in memory of him. I believe it was a female relative of the son who was on the diaries page. Sorry I don't know the exact link, but I'm sure you can dig around there with this info...?
posted by Asparagirl at 6:07 PM on February 12, 2006

Since March, my pal Nathan Marsak and I have been blogging a crime a day from 1947 Los Angeles, thus inserting a lot of otherwise off-the-web family names into the search engines. We fairly frequently hear from descendents of both victims and perpetrators, most of whom ask us for copies our old newspaper sources and share their family legends, which usually differ widely from published reports.
posted by Scram at 6:20 PM on February 12, 2006

A friend of mine who served in Viet Nam read, years later, an account by a journalist. I think he found it online, but he may have come across it in a book or magazine.

In any case, according to the account, one night in VietNam during the war, the reporter had been out in the brush or the jungle or whatever the term is; somewhere without buildings or roads, at any rate. Some troops approached and he didn't know whether they were US or VC or North Vietnamese. And even if they were friendly, he was in an area where he wasn't allowed so they might just assume he was an enemy, shoot first, and ask questions later. So the reporter took cover in the brush. They got closer and closer and then stopped. The reporter was sure he was history, but the soldiers finally moved on without firing.

Going by various specifics in the story - time, place, etc. - my friend determined that he himself had been one of the approaching soldiers. He remembered the night in question. He and his compatriots had indeed seen someone hiding in the brush, didn't know whether he was an enemy, and had debated about whether they should shoot him. They finally decided against it.

Another strange one...

I was perusing some, ahem, adult images online when I came across nude pictures of someone I knew; an ex-girlfriend's cousin.
posted by Clay201 at 6:42 PM on February 12, 2006

I was definitely not looking at Fleshbot, but it linked to a blog, complete with pictures, of someone I believe to be one of my past TAs. Yesterday, I was looking at a map of sex offenders (via) and found my piano tuner. Sorry if those aren't the heartwarming tales you'd like.
posted by booksandlibretti at 7:08 PM on February 12, 2006

A friend of mine was doing searches for his own name on eBay and found a WWII-era map case with his last name inside. He bid on it and won, then showed it to his grandmother, who recognized the handwriting as belonging to her brother, who was a German paratrooper.
posted by MegoSteve at 8:06 PM on February 12, 2006

Well, this is probably not exactly what you're looking for, but it's remarkable nonetheless: a 17-year-old boy finds online that he was kidnapped 14 years earlier.
posted by Tuwa at 8:43 PM on February 12, 2006

these are awesome -- and yes, that Kos link was the very one I was trying to recall: here's the page, if anyone else is interested. It's an amazing story, there's a kind of vertigo.

And these other stories are exactly what I'm looking for, thanks -- they don't have to all be heartwarming... it should be like real life, you know? Full spectrum. Thanks!
posted by cloudscratcher at 9:02 PM on February 12, 2006

Sites like Friendster and Multiply... I've discovered long-lost friends since school and college who turned out to be friends of friends.
posted by arrowhead at 9:51 PM on February 12, 2006

When I was a kid, my parents were Jehovah's Witnesses. My dad, who can weld, volunteered to spend a summer in Wicklow, Ireland (we live in Northern Ireland) working on the new HQ that was being built there. During the summer, my mother and me were invited to stay with a JW family (single mother, two kids) that lived near the site, so that we could see my dad for awhile. The family had a daughter (V.) close to my age (9 at the time) and we became pretty good friends and visited them again the following year. V's mother later married a JW man who was friends with my dad and they all, as far as I knew, lived happily ever after.

About a decade later and my parents are divorced and no longer JWs and I have long lost touch with V. and have been hanging out on a rather small, obscure ex-JW "support" message board. The message board is mostly full of middle-aged American ex-JWs, with me being the youngest at 19 and only one or two other Brits. One day, a message was posted by a young woman who had been disfellowshipped from the organisation and whose mother had kicked her out and stepfather had physically abused her.

I decided to reply to her since she was around my age and obviously having a hard time, and I noticed that she used her last name in her username. I didn't recognise it straight away, and then when I did I thought it would be completely impossible for it to be her. The board displayed the user's IP address, so I decided to do a quick check and, unbelievably, the IP address was in Wicklow, Ireland. I contacted her to confirm it, and it was her and she remembered me! We talked on the phone the next day.

I guess this might not seem so extraordinary, but for two extremely devout JW kids to both find their way out of what I now believe to be a cult, and to both look to the internet for support and to post on a board that is not large or well-known is really quite something, I think. Certainly the most amazing coincidence of my life so far!
posted by speranza at 9:57 PM on February 12, 2006

happened to me one time here on metafilter when i recognized a username and realized it was an old coworker from about 8 years ago. nothing extraordinary like the concentration camp story, but like kimota's, it was a "it's a small 'net after all" sort of experience.
posted by sergeant sandwich at 12:24 AM on February 13, 2006

I was looking at voyeurweb and the first link I clicked on showed a picture of one of my one night stands as a stripper at a contest in Indiana. Small world indeed.
posted by skEwb at 1:21 AM on February 13, 2006

I always loved that AskMe thread about the guy looking for an obscure poem from an 80s Amiga magazine: here.

I asked a girl out once, and some friends later told me that she was a SuicideGirl. It's like a setup for a distinctly 21st-century sitcom, that.
posted by sixacross at 4:30 AM on February 13, 2006

I got an email a few years back asking if my grandmother's name was Anne and if she had a sister whose name was Mildred (both true). Years before I had left some biographical information on a geneology Web site and she was responding to a query I had left there.

The person writing turned out to be my cousin. And, as luck would have it we both lived in the same city (we have no other relatives living in this city). We've become very good friends.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 8:07 AM on February 13, 2006

I thought this was pretty cool--I told the story of my wife's engagement ring, and another metafilterian confirmed it, since she happened to work with my (to be) wife at the time.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:15 AM on February 13, 2006

This was a good one, too. And I recognized one of the subjects of a post about bizarre personal ads.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:19 AM on February 13, 2006

I used to visitng a gaming-news website and randomly e-mailed and chatted up one of the staff members there. After talking for a while, I realized that she was someone I'd gone to pre-K/kindergarten with and hadn't seen since.
posted by ShawnStruck at 8:57 AM on February 13, 2006

My dad got an email message from a guy who was doing some genealogy research on the Internet and stumbled across his old website. (My dad had an old picture of himself and his brother with their parents on that page.) Turns out this guy is a distant cousin of ours, on my dad's father's side - a branch of the family we know almost nothing about.
posted by SisterHavana at 9:39 AM on February 13, 2006

I'm currently dating a girl i met via MySpace, who it turns out I went to school with, but never met. BUT on her last day at the school, her leaving book was handed to me and i signed it.

We we're looking at it lastnight. Kinda odd.
posted by lemonfridge at 2:06 PM on February 13, 2006

Running my best friend's site (she's a regional celebrity), I run into quite a few people who are long-lost friends of hers. One such story that I fondly recall was an email from a junior of hers during university that Googled her name and wanted to keep in touch. I forwarded her the email (I get a lot of cranks too so I wanted to make sure) and sure enough, they knew each other. Really sweet!

The Malaysian online scene is really small; someone's bound to know someone else in a myriad of different ways. If you're in the arts, entertainment, media, literary, blogging, or activist scene - you know each other.

From random Googling I found the blog of someone who works at a Starbucks that was patronized by staff of a TV channel I was a fan of. (Said best friend is from that channel). Thanks to that blogger, I got back in touch with the channel - and tomorrow I start my new job with them as a production assistant.

Here's a recent entry on my LJ about a bunch of random connections discovered on MSN. The comments are even more remarkable because it seems everyone on my Friends List, no matter how I found them, know each other.
posted by divabat at 6:51 PM on February 13, 2006