Several years ago I did some work on a friend's family history here in New Zealand.
As with many settlers of European descent, his family lines traced back to Scotland, Ireland and England, with several of them in Devon and Cornwall.
One Cornish family were quite well off and had a very nice house. The house is still owned by a descendant of the family, and does bed and breakfast, so I was able to see on their website that there were various large oil paintings of the family members hanging on the walls, many of them from the late 1700s. Having contacted the nice owners there, who were very interested to hear there were descendants in New Zealand, they sent me good photographs of my friend's ancestors, which I passed on to them.
Out of the blue this week I had a surprise email from the people at the house, to say that 2 paintings had come up for sale in an auction house in the town, and the auction was that day!
Luckily England is 13 hours behind New Zealand at the moment, so I contacted my friend right away with a link to the auction house.
The auction would have started at 9pm NZ time.
At 6am, (I was not awake, but saw the message later), my friend texted me to say they were now the proud owner of the paintings of his husband and wife Georgian ancestors.
That's pretty exciting stuff, especially in New Zealand where European history doesn't start until well into the 1800s.
I love it when all the stars align to create a happy ending!