The Concept of the Google-Ganger, that other person with your name you or others discover when your name is googled. (Newsweek).

‘Gelwan’ is a very rare surname and every Google reference to ‘Eliot Gelwan’ relates to this one. My grandfather and his sisters emigrated to the US early in the 20th century; my father and one childless brother were born in New York, so the only Gelwans closely related to me are my brother and my children (my wife keeps her own name).

I’ve discovered several other “Gelwans’ through Google. Perhaps uncannily, three others, all in the New York area, (a husband, wife, and brother) are physicians, like myself. I have been in e-contact with them and we cannot figure out any way in which we might be related. Probably we represent a case of convergent evolution — different names from Eastern Europe identically anglicized at Ellis Island.

There is also a Vladimir Gelwan, who used to be the principal dancer with the Latvian National Ballet and now has a ballet school in Berlin. I suspect he and I might be related, since my paternal ancestors are known to have come from Riga. And then there are the Brazilian and Lebanese Gelwans, as discovered by googling. I have written to Berlin, to Brazil and to Beirut, but have not gotten replies.

My father once told me that a Gelwan had once knocked on our door in New York when I was a young child, having come from Brazil and discovered us in a New York City phone book.

Since we have such an attenuated family, my perennial search for Gelwans online is I think motivated by a yearning for family connectivity — especially for my children’s sake — as much as the usual ego-driven pleasures of googling one’s name. Ah, well, for better or worse a fate you with more common names, or those where more geneological precision is possible, will never experience…