I first posted this blog ten years ago today.
It is about a strange coincidence which Síle and I discovered just when we started to go out together, concerning a photograph which must now be at least eighty years old.

Sile and I had met in Sion Hill teacher training college in 1971 and had started to go out together in Connemara in the Easter of 1972.
Of course Sile had to come to Cork as soon as possible to meet all the family and friends, she was from Skerries and had beem born and reared in Westmeath, so would never have met these people before.
We went to see my friends Siobhan and Sue Curtis who lived on the Magazine Road in Cork at that time (the last entry photograph of the two of us must have been taken then by one of them in their back garden)
As soon as we were in the sitting room of their house Sile spotted this photograph of Sue and Siobhan’s parents wedding on the mantlepiece over the fire.

Something about it obviously intrigued her as she stood up for a closer look. She had recognised her mother in the photograph!

Sile was quite correct , her mother was not just at the wedding but had acted as chief bridesmaid.
Sile’s parents and the Curtis parents had been friends in the forties but had lost touch over the years.
Madge Curtis (better known to the people of Cork as “Maeve” the woman’s editor of the Cork Examiner) had been on holiday in Glengarrif with Sile’s mother when she had met Tony Curtis, the groom in the wedding photo.
The two ladies had taken photographs of each other on their bikes on that holiday and we found these recently when looking through old photos in Sile’s parents house in Skerries.
This is the one of Sile’s Mum

And this of Madge Curtis

Small world isn’t it!