coincidence and family trees

Lorna Partridge’s splitting headache provided her with a good excuse to leave the Association of Dissatisfied Lawyers after she had presented her book. It had been a hard day. In the morning she had seen to the changes in Pricefighter’s will and testament to the benefit of the newly-founded Pricefighter Vulture Research Foundation. Now, the presentation.

Lorna however was not one to fail to notice coincidence or synchronicity in her life. Her new book was a biography of her great great great grandfather, world famous explorer and naturist Sir Reginald Sleeping, to whom she had not been aware she was related until she faffed about one day with a Family Tree Searcher CD-Rom that had come with a premium brand pack of breakfast cereals (superfluous information perchance?).

Several months and much research later, Lorna presented her book "Sleeping: A life that finished". It included descriptions of various episodes of Sleeping’s life such as the Borneo and New Guinea expeditions and his expulsion from the Club for wearing neither tie nor other clothes. The book also featured Lorna’s description of her ancestor’s death in 1889 when, after falling 6,000 feet in the Atlas mountains (in what is now Morocco) and breaking most of his bones, Sleeping made some painstakingly detailed notes on the behaviour of Eurasian Griffon Vultures (Gyps fulvus) as they wolfed his innards.