Tl;dr A a chance comment on graduation day led to my best friend from University and I realising our families first me in 1922. They were great friends for >60 years until their deaths and helped each other out at some very trying times in their lives.
I was assigned random accommodation in my first year of uni. Next door room was a guy from a small island off the coast of England. We both did the same course, he's now one of my best friends & we lived together throughout uni too. On graduation day, I went for dinner with his family & during small talk his father mentioned he had heard of my not so well known home town.
When I started uni, my father wanted me to ask my flatmate if he knew anyone on the island with a certain surname. My gt grandmother & an island family were friends and we have loads of pictures/letters of them together. I did eventually ask but he said he didn't or I said the wrong surname...can't remember!
I'm not sure why but his father's comment 4 years later made me wonder though. I asked again, flatmate asked his family and it turns out they knew the family!
More specifically it was their family! So flatmate's gt grandparents and my gt grandparents were great friends having met in 1922 in a tea room on the island. We have a postcard from them just after their first meeting. My gt grandparents went on their honeymoon to the island, stopped at a lighthouse (picture on postcard) and had some tea, his gt grandparents happened to be there too.
More specifically the ladies met in the tea room's bathroom. One of the ladies knicker elastic snapped and they asked the other for a pin. From that initial meeting they met up fairly regularly judging by photos & postcards and stayed with each other on their holidays.
During WW2 the island was occupied by Germany. Two of the children of the island family were a soldier & a nurse in England. Unable to go home they would stay with my gt grandmother at her second home when they had leave. We have a few Red Cross letters between the families giving updates about the children and wishing happy birthday etc. The youngest child was hospitalised after the occupation and transferred to England for treatment... to a hospital just down the road from my gt grandparents main house during WW2. The patient got in touch with my gt grandmother by ringing the nearest phone box to the house, the person who answered then got a message to my gt grandmother and she hopped on a bus to the hospital to see her. After her discharge she then visited our home (we still live here today) and we have pictures of the lady in our local park. This lady was flatmate's grandmother.
My grandmother then met my grandfather and visited the island with her new fiancee and his family. Flatmate's grandmother had just had a daughter, who my nan took out for a stroll in a pram. The baby is flatmate's aunt.
On the death of my grandfather, when my father was 3, a family friend & nurse heard the news, and came to help, arriving the same day. Dad remembers seeing her climbing up the stairs. After this discovery he now knows it was the daughter who had been a nurse in the war.
The two families stayed in touch mainly with the soldier & exchanged cards etc until the 1980s on the death of my gt grandmother.
So we've had a bit of a break but 2022 is our centenary! My flatmate knew none of his family history, luckily my grandmother was able to tell us lots of this and we have pictures to aid us too.
It's is still very strange to think I'd grown up seeing pictures of his family before ever meeting him. You can even see a family resemblance in some of the photos & looking through the old trunk of photos was one of my favourite things to do as a kid as I love history.
It's still incredible to me and all stemmed from a comment his father now can't remember making! We've shared everything we have with his family who knew very little about their history. So yes we achieved what my father had been hoping to do all along, albeit 4 years later.