A sprinkle of Grandma-magic!

If you know me and how passionately I want to learn about our family's history,  you can well imagine that even now, several months after returning home from a trip to Manapad, I find myself in a sort of history-haze... looking through the sepia photos, staring at the grandeur of  the old Manapad mansions, marvelling at the faith of my ancestors, and the benevolence of my parents and grandparents.

Everyday, I drift from photographs to letters, from memoirs to family trees, and that is exactly what happened a few days before when I was looking at the missing parts of the tree and thinking to myself how sad it is that I had never seen pictures of my great grandpa on my Grandma's side. 

Imagine my surprise when I got a beep on my phone just a couple of days later, with nothing but a simple message and an old, grainy photograph: "Marietta.. that's your grandmother's father"

A long-lost second cousin once removed, who found me almost by accident... through some old court documents from 1958 that she had read. 

Did she know exactly what I was missing? She couldn't possibly! Unless there is magic involved. 

Over the next few days we've been in constant conversation, all day and until late at night, about our common passion for collecting our snippets of family history. Sharing pictures that are moving us both to tears, stories of parents and grandparents, and longing. 

We discovered that both our grandmothers were brilliant storytellers. Among all the things we had in common, the one that moved me to tears is the similarities in two of the pictures we shared. Pictures from over 30 years ago! 

Two grandmothers, passing on some sort of storyteller magic to little girls that they loved and doted on...

Who would've thought that one day, these two little girls- both almost strangers to each other, and yet tied together by powerful familial bonds, would one day find each other almost by accident- and discover their common passion for recording and documenting their shared family history!??

Magic? You can say that again! 

These two phenomenal women definitely made us both believe in their magic.