This is a short one, but it’s fun. — Dan

The Great Geraint Woolford Coincidence

There are many Dan Lewises in this world. There is, of course, me -- the one who wrote the words you are currently reading. I once worked at a law firm with another Dan Lewis. I have a somewhat distant cousin named Dan Lewis. There’s a Dan Lewis who has written about fun facts for Smithsonian Magazine, which is doubly weird because I have also written about fun facts for Smithsonian Magazine. I went to college with another Dan Lewis; he was a year older but the library got us confused, and when he was set to graduate, they didn’t care that he hadn’t returned his library book yet because they thought I had taken it out. (Thankfully, I was able to resolve that issue before I graduated a year later.) When you have a name that is as common as mine, weird coincidences happen. 

But there aren’t as many Geraint Woolfords. Which is what made an otherwise normal day in December 2009 so strange.

That month, Geraint Woolford, a 77-year-old from Llandudno, Wales, checked into Abergele Hospital in North Wales for a hip replacement. He was assigned to a room with two beds, which is often the case in hospitals. And shortly thereafter, another patient arrived — a 52-year-old from Ruthin, Wales, about 30 or so miles from Llandudno. The other patient was in need of a partial knee replacement. His name? Geraint Woolford.

Even if their names were common, say, “John Smith,” that’d be an unlikely outcome. But this coincidence went beyond unlikely and bordered on the impossible. That’s because there aren’t a lot of Geraint Woolfords in the world. In fact, the Telegraph investigated the name, and found that “the public records office showed they are the only two people in Britain called Geraint Woolford.” 

The two hadn’t met before and were not related, but as they got to talking, they learned that their similarities went beyond their name. As the BBC reported, “Both are senior members of their local Conservative clubs and are former policemen. Both men had grandfathers who were horse trainers in north Wales and their daughters [knew] each other through work.” But unfortunately, they were in the hospital for similar but different surgeries, and having them both in the same room was risky for the hospital. (And really stupid, too — what was the hospital thinking?!) As one of the two Geraint Woolfords told the BBC, “They had to double check and triple check everything” to ensure that the right Geraint was getting the right treatment. The pair of patients, however, didn’t seem to mind — and, in fact, used the hospital’s tight spot as a source of levity. As the other Gertaint Woolford told the Telegraph, “We had a lot of fun in the hospital. Every time the staff came to me I said: ‘Are you sure that's for me, are you sure you've got the right one.’”

Their procedures went out without a hitch and, as the younger Woolford told the BBC, “we've both definitely had the right operations.”

More About People with the Same Name

Today’s Bonus fact: For years, a man named Pierre Joubert was listed in the Guinness World Records book as the man with the longest lifespan — he lived to be 113 years old (July 1701 to November 1814). But as the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research explains, that didn’t quite happen. Per the Institute, Early researchers used historical documents to find people who lived to be very old, and “the identification of the Pierre Joubert who died in 1814 with the one born in 1701 relied on the rarity of the name” — simply put, there weren’t a lot of Pierre Jouberts out there. But what they actually found were two Jouberts, a father and a son. The father lived to be about 65 years old; the son, roughly 85. Guinness relied on the erroneous research starting at its inception in 1955; the error wasn’t discovered (and corrected) until 1990.

From the Archives: Brown Bear, Banned Bear: Bill Martin is a rather common name, but it somehow still caused confusion.

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And thanks! — Dan