Week 22 of #52Ancestors Challenge: Reunion
When people ask about the greatest reunion of my life, they expect me to talk about discovering long-lost ancestors through dusty church records or connecting with distant DNA cousins across continents. After all, my blog is filled with stories of Swedish brick walls, mysterious fathers, and family trees that span generations. But the most meaningful reunion in my story isn’t about genealogy at all—it’s about love, timing, and finding your way back to someone who was meant to be part of your story all along.
“Your story should be a Hallmark movie!” That’s what our jeweler said when Bill and I went shopping for our wedding bands. And you know what? He might just be right.
Where It All Began: Youth Group Days, 1986
Picture this: it’s early 1986, and I’m a junior at an all-girls private Catholic high school in suburban Cincinnati. Bill is a senior at a public high school about 8 miles away, about to graduate. We’re both active members of our church youth group—that wonderful, chaotic mix of teenagers trying to figure out faith, friendship, and the future. Different high schools, but the same community of kids who spent almost every Sunday evening together, had ice cream socials, mulch sales and lock-ins, and somehow made the church youth group area feel like the most important place in the world.
First Love and Handwritten Letters
Naturally, Bill and I started growing closer over those spring months and into the summer of 1986. When summer ended and Bill headed off to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, we did what teenagers did in those pre-internet days—we wrote letters. Real, handwritten letters that Bill still has to this day! (Yes, he’s kept them all these years—if that’s not romantic, I don’t know what is.)
When he came home for visits, we’d meet up with our youth group crowd, but we also started going on solo dates. In December 1986, I invited Bill to my high school’s Christmas Ball as my date. We had a wonderful time, and I thought we had something special.
But sometimes teenage hearts aren’t ready for the complications of distance and different life stages. As I prepared for my own high school graduation, I decided the long-distance relationship was too much. I wrote Bill a letter ending things—and yes, he kept that one too.
The Years Apart: Different Paths, Different Lives
I graduated from high school in 1987 and stayed close to home for college at the University of Cincinnati, while Bill continued his studies at Miami. Without email or the internet to keep us connected, our contact became minimal, and we eventually lost touch completely. Our lives headed in very different directions.
By 1991, I had met someone else. I married in 1993 and welcomed my son a few years later. Bill was building his own life and career. For more than two decades, we existed in completely separate worlds, probably driving past each other on Cincinnati highways without knowing it, living parallel lives in the same city but universes apart.
Looking back now, I can see that we both needed those years to grow into the people we were meant to become. Sometimes timing is everything, and our timing simply wasn’t right in the 1980s.
Enter Facebook: The Bridge Back to Each Other
Fast forward to early 2009, when Facebook was THE place to reconnect with old friends and classmates. Like so many people of our generation, Bill and I found each other pretty quickly in that digital reunion space. We became “Facebook friends” in February 2009 and started the tentative dance of liking and commenting on each other’s posts.
What Bill didn’t know at the time was that my marriage was falling apart. By June 2009, I would be separated and heading toward divorce—one of the most difficult periods of my life. Bill and I met for dinner once that summer for his birthday, but mostly we kept in touch through Facebook over the next decade.
We had two mini reunions for our youth group friends that year—one just after Thanksgiving 2009 at P.J.’s in Montgomery, and another just after Christmas 2009 at Buffalo Wild Wings. Bill and I saw each other at both gatherings, but with about a dozen people each time, it wasn’t easy to catch up in any meaningful way. I was still reeling from the breakup of my marriage that summer anyway, so they were just pleasant but brief exchanges of pleasantries among old friends.
I was busy picking up the pieces, raising my pre-teen son, and trying to rebuild my life from the ground up.
March 2019: The Real Reunion Begins
By March 2019, my life had finally found its equilibrium again. My son was in college, I was probably the happiest I’d been in years, and I thought I had everything figured out. That’s when Bill reached out with an invitation that would change everything: would I like to join him and some friends for pub trivia?
I was completely nervous about seeing him in person again after all these years. What would we talk about? Would it be awkward? Would we even recognize the people we’d become? But something made me say yes, and I’m so grateful I did.
The only problem with that first trivia night was that the bar was so loud we could barely hear each other, let alone have a real conversation. So we made plans to meet the following week for dinner to properly catch up. We chose Slatts in Blue Ash—a decision that would prove to be more significant than either of us realized at the time.
Three Hours and a Lifetime of Catching Up
That dinner at Slatts was supposed to be a simple catch-up between old friends. Three hours later, the restaurant staff was practically hovering around our table, ready to close for the night! We had talked so much and been so absorbed in our conversation that we’d completely lost track of time.
As I drove home that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation. We had SO much in common now—similar goals and dreams, places we wanted to travel, things we wanted to try. It was as if the universe had been preparing us both for this moment, shaping us into people who would be perfectly compatible if we ever found our way back to each other.
I quickly became a regular on the pub trivia team, which meant seeing Bill every week. But we also started spending time together outside of trivia nights. Slowly, I realized that Bill was becoming more than just a friend from my past—I was falling in love with him. And the most wonderful discovery of all? He felt exactly the same way.
Coming Home to Each Other
We became inseparable—spending more time together than apart, taking weekend trips, going to Reds games and the zoo, and meeting each other’s families. Bill even coordinated a surprise 50th birthday party for me with my parents and my son, proving he understood not just me, but the importance of family in my life. Pub trivia friends, happy hour friends, and youth group friends were all in attendance—a beautiful blend of the different communities that had shaped our lives.
In January 2020, we took the plunge and Bill moved into my house. Little did we know that in less than three months, a global pandemic would force the entire world into lockdown, and we’d be “stuck” together 24/7. But being stuck together wasn’t a hardship—it was a gift. Those months brought us even closer, and by August 2020, Bill proposed to me at Slatts, the very restaurant where we’d had our first real conversation after all those years apart.
Of course I said yes!
Full Circle: A Love Story Worth Waiting For
We married on December 28, 2021, in a small COVID-era ceremony with just our parents, my son Zac, Bill’s brother Kevin, and our officiant Jeff—a dear friend, fellow trivia teammate, and ordained minister. Our great friend Cindy, also from our youth group days, was our photographer, making our small wedding feel like a true reunion of the people who had been part of our story from the very beginning. While we couldn’t have the big celebration we’d dreamed of, we had something more precious: we had each other, the wisdom that comes from knowing what it’s like to live without your other half, and the beautiful symmetry of having a representative of our youth group family witness this new chapter.
As I reflect on our reunion story, I’m struck by how it mirrors the genealogical work I love so much. Sometimes the most important connections in our lives get lost for a while, buried under time and circumstance. But with patience, a little luck, and the right tools (whether that’s DNA testing or Facebook!), we can find our way back to where we belong.
Bill and I didn’t just reunite—we came home to each other. And yes, our jeweler was absolutely right: this definitely is Hallmark movie material. All we’re missing is the big celebration at the end, but honestly? The real happy ending is getting to wake up every morning next to my teenage sweetheart, 35+ years later, knowing that some love stories are worth the wait.
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