Do y’all have any facebook friends who share your last name but are [most likely] not blood relatives? I have a few. One woman mostly shares pics of vintage sports cars and exotic birds. Innocuous fare. Another guy I can’t quite figger. “Retail [person’s first name]’s daily deals” videos. ??? Like I do NOT SHOP? He also seems innocuous though. I let these folks’ posts just fly on by.

At some point I started getting FLOODED with friend *suggestions* for people with my last name. There are a bunch out there in Australia / New Zealand. Were their ancestors former prisoners? And there seems to be a Utah / Idaho type group. Are they Mormons? I have yet to see anyone from Cananada, which is where my family emigrated (from Scotland) and rumor has it some of the (many) boys in that generation joined the Mounties and mixed it up with the Native Americans there. My own great grandfather was friendly with Native Americans in northern Saskatchewan but he was already married when he went there and that’d be a whole ‘nother story 😀

I do not EVER send friend requests to anyone I don’t know personally. I am friends with these couple of people because they sent *me* requests and they looked harmless. And they share my name. I mean, if I really wanted to connect with people who share my name, Ancestry would probably be the place to go but I have a weirdly tentative relationship with Ancestry although I do have a membership.

An odd thing is that a while back, I was scrolling through “people you might know” and it was FILLED (that day) with Fins. Somehow the next day someone accepted *my* friend request. Say what? I did NOT request a connection with this person and I’m pretty sure I didn’t accidentally drag a finger. This has happened a couple times with other people and I am always kind of embarrassed about it. Like should I tell the person “I don’t really wanna be friends with you unless you really wanna be friends with me?” I dunno. Awkward, awkward, awkward.

Now I am seeing a suggested friend with my (late) little brother’s name. Jim “Fin”. My brother died before facebook. He was on Instant Messenger and I remember one beautiful afternoon sitting out in the back yard I/M-ing with @BigBandGuy. An apt handle for him because he was a jazz trombonist with a major focus on the big band style. He even played with Woody Herman a few times when he was in college.

This Jim “Fin” has not sent me a friend request and I will not send him one. He doesn’t really look like my brother except that he is tall (maybe taller than my brother) and maybe blond but it’s hard to tell. He is definitely a LOT younger than my brother, like even a lot younger than my brother in this pic.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2022 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.