Two Rescue Dogs Named After the Same Nowhere

My rescue greyhound came named Stanhoe — the shelter's best guess at the word on his collar tag, half worn away. It is nobody's dog name; it is, I eventually learned, a village of about two hundred people. I kept it because he answered to it.

At the dog park last spring, I called him, and two dogs came. Mine, and a bewildered spaniel belonging to a woman my age, who stared at me and said: 'How do you know his name?' Her rescue was also called Stanhoe. Also from a worn tag, also a shelter's guess — different shelter, different county, four years apart.

We did the dog-park laugh about it, and then we did the maths and stopped laughing. Two hand-engraved tags, two abandoned dogs, one micro-village neither of us had ever visited. Over coffee — the dogs insisted, they had become instantly inseparable, which should have been our first clue about the day's agenda — we compared notes. She was adopted as an infant, searching for her birth family on and off for a decade. I was donor-conceived, mildly curious, never pursued.

You can see where this is going, and I promise we could not. Stanhoe, when she dug back through her file that evening, appeared in her paperwork: her birth mother's village. She drove out there the next weekend, with the spaniel, on the strength of a dog tag. The trail that opened — a retired midwife, a chapel register, a farmhouse — found her two living uncles and, in time, her birth mother's grave and her birth mother's letters.

One letter mentioned the writer's brother, who had 'helped young couples the modern way' in the seventies through a clinic. His name and that clinic appear in my file.

We are, as far as the paperwork can establish, cousins. The dogs, who established it first, decline to explain their methods.