I can count on one hand the number of people in my life I’ve met who have the same last name as me who wasn’t related. In fact, I could count it on just one finger. I knew there were distant relatives in Ohio who shared our last name and I knew, probably, there were some even more distant relatives in Croatia or Serbia with the old spelling of my last name. Surprisingly I have never actually counted. In fact, before I was old enough to enter the world of social media I actually thought we were the only ones. Which is crazy, right?

I know there are some Salays in Ohio whom I am not related to. I know this because when I was in high school a girl from Ohio also named Brittany Salay added me on Facebook. I can prove now that there is no relation. In my head this always made sense, that my last name would be an uncommon one, so I never really took the time to count.

There are at least 660 Salays in the U.S. and Canada, and at least 99 Salajs. In Serbia, there are at least 70. I say at least because that is the amount listed in the Serbian White Pages which are in fact in Serbian, so I have trouble reading it. The U.S. alone has 318.9 million and counting. It’s not so crazy I haven’t met any of the other Salays who aren’t related to me. And, knowing how my family’s name changed after a few years in America, who is to say that other Salajs aren’t related to me. Maybe they moved to other countries where their names changed into something else.

It’s so uncertain. I can’t follow every lead I find in the phone book. I can’t follow leads in languages I don’t understand. For all I know, some of the people I think I’m related to might not even be 100% related (if you get what I mean). But that’s part of the reason I enjoy genealogy so much; not everything I find is certain and sometimes I find information that proves the opposite. Other times, I find exactly what I was looking for. Other times, I find Salajs in Canada or R. Salaj in Serbia. Those are the things that make it worth it in the end.