Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 2 Oct 2016.
Yesterday I attended the Florida Genealogical Society’s sponsored seminar given by Judy Russell, CG. Judy is always such a dynamic presenter!
Typically, when I attend a seminar, I somehow find a relation to another attendee and yesterday was no exception. Judy had mentioned HIPPA and there was a question from an audience member regarding the number of years that records are held privately. I added that I had done some client work and discovered that I could obtain medically related records from a state facility and the court records regarding the medical issue were housed in the Florida State Library. This was for an individual that had died in 1973, just 43 years ago. The records I had received, though, were from a period over 50 years ago but the individual had continued to reside in the facility more recently than 50 years ago.
Shortly after there was a break and a woman sitting directly behind me introduced herself. Her father had been the psychologist at the facility from which I had obtained the records during the time the individual I was researching was living there. The attendee had just visited her father two weeks ago and had taken a trip to that area two weeks ago; she remarked that it looked the same.
It then hit me that I had once had a professor who also had been employed at the facility I asked her if her father had ever become a professor at a local college in the 1970’s as my instructor had been the psychologist at the same facility in the 1940’s and 1950’s. It appears that the seminar attendee’s father replaced the professor as her father had joined the facility in 1959 after an interim staff member was let go. So, I had connected with two of three psychologists that could have treated the client’s relative.
I live over 200 miles from the medical facility. The professor had lived in my county but the individual I was researching, the woman I met yesterday and her father never lived here. The father of the attendee lives over 300 miles away from me. Yet our paths all crossed. Definitely is a small world!