Gotta love small European towns (especially Italy!). Summer of my junior year in high school a friend and I stayed with some friends of his family in a small town in France for a couple weeks. Almost every single night was a dinner party with a dozen people and a dozen bottles of wine.
@4kids4us - my in-laws had the same experience in Italy, and then it turned out that they weren’t related! It didn’t stop the party though, it just made everyone laugh.
I also have a unique name and a man called me out of the blue when I was a college student. I found it a bit off putting, even though he was sweet.
I agree that young people aren’t usually so interested in these things and to compound it, this cousin may have notifications turned off or she may just be accustomed to ignoring them. You can’t take it personally when someone doesn’t reply to social media. You just can’t know what their “style” is for reading and responding to things.
@Mommertons, I remember that thread!
Funny story ,a third cousin of mine teaches teaches at the college my D2 attends. We had never met, but my grandmas first cousin told me I had a relative at the school. My daughter and I went to her office and introduced ourselves. She was super nice! We are the great grandkids of siblings. Her great grandma and my great grandad were the youngest boy and girl, and the last to pass. There were both living well into our 30s.
FOURTH cousins? They have great great grandparents in common? “Distant” barely even describes the tenuousness of this relationship.
@MomOf3DDs I’m not sure exactly where I saw the list; it was on the university’s website somewhere.
But I specifically looked at it because my daughter’s university was located only 30 miles from where another branch of the family settled and I wanted to see if any of our cousins were going to school there. As I mentioned, I do a lot of business with a double third cousin who is the absentee owner of the original “farm,” which is why I am so familiar with how this branch of the family ended up where they did.
Double cousins are descendants of two brothers who marry two sisters (or two brother-sister pairs). Double first cousins theoretically share the same amount of DNA as half siblings, although I think in practice it tends to be slightly higher; and so on.
@BasicOhioParent He raided my hometown and blew up the depot. Author Willie Morris told me the raid delayed the fall of Vicksburg by six months and almost got Grant fired. During the raid an Oxford blacksmith serving under Van Dorn grabbed a bunch of sheets of uncut currency and put them under his horse’s saddle blanket, which made him quite prosperous after the war. William Faulkner was aware of this story and used it as a plot detail in one of his novels. Also, I am sending you a private message.
To all: Thanks for your comments. As I said, our world isn’t ending. I’m surprised at those who said they knew that those with the same last name were almost certainly cousins but yet wouldn’t make any effort to make contact. But children invariably have less sense of family that their parents. My children didn’t grow up in my home county and thus don’t really know most of their close cousins.
xpost
For some interested in genealogy, it’s just not uncommon to run into distant collateral relatives. I met someone tracing the wider line of DH’s 3rd gr grandmother, on Ancestry. Off the top of my head, no idea what nth degree relative he was, how many times removed.
But you don’t just drop out of the air onto them. You send a letter with enough to id yourself, follow a bit of protocol. Same applies to OP’s “find.” They owe you zero return contact. And especially with younger kids, girls, it would’ve been more respectful to verify the relationship first. Not FB as a total unknown.
I agree with @lookingforward. I’ve made contact with a number of second+ cousins through genealogical research (and been contacted as well), in each case via a polite email or letter introducing myself and what I thought the connection might be. Everyone I contacted was delighted to be found, but I made it clear in the letters I sent that I would understand if they preferred to not respond. When of my genealogical “finds” was my father’s first cousin; his father and my father’s mother had been estranged for years, had both since died, and no one alive could remember what lead to the estrangement. My father’s cousin was absolutely thrilled to re-connect, but you never know.
I think my kids would find it weird to be contacted.
I am a southerner and so absolutely get this. At our annual family reunion, frequently there is a cousin in attendance who lives on the west coast. His parents lived on the west coast. However, all his folks are in the family cemetery and he is writing a family history so he likes to hang out with the rest of us and collect tall tales. When I was a girl, my grandmother kept telling me which kissing cousins she imagined as good long term marriage prospects for me. (I did not marry a cousin or stay in the south)
If this had been my daughter, and she wanted to reach out to a cousin, I would not have thought facebook the best way. In my opinion, better would have been a handwritten note, explaining the connection (in pretty good detail and some current information on parents, etc) and an invitation for coffee or something similar. Maybe email replaces a note these days.
However, when I went to college my parents took the cousins there out to lunch or dinner with us, after calling their parents ahead of time to let them know the invite was coming. That might have been best in your situation. My parents did know all the other parents, even if they hadn’t seen them since their own college days and we had never met these college students.
My kids went to colleges where they had no cousins. Sometimes that seems very sad to me. Certainly some of my cousins don’t understand it one bit and didn’t mind telling me so at the time.
I think maybe your expectations were a little optimistic and unrealistic.
I agree that sometimes people ignore social media posts from people they don’t think they know.
Maybe a better approach is to have your D email the cousin via the school email account and explain the connection in a light-hearted way and see if she gets a response
I was out to lunch and met a friendly waitress with my mother’s maiden name. We quickly determined we are relatives, know the same people, etc., and gave each other a quick hug. On the other hand, several people with my married name have sent me friend requests. I look at their accounts and then ignore them. Difference - I talk to strangers, but not on the internet. I definitely wouldn’t expect two college students to be interested in this distant connection.
I’ve made connections with relatives through Ancestry, but I believe that is a different scenario as generally those on Ancestry and similar sites are looking for family connections, either directly or indirectly. It’s totally different when you get an email out of the blue saying “Hey, we have the same last night. We’re cousins. Let’s meet.”
My father was one of 10, and I grew up with a multitude of local cousins that I barely knew and wouldn’t recognize if I passed them on the street. We were not close with that side of the family when I was growing up for a variety of reasons and I really have nothing in common with them other than the fact that our parents had the same parents. With that many kids in my father’s family spread over 25 years or so with moves to different states over those years, some didn’t spend much (if any) time living in the same household or city. Some had left home when others were very young - or even after they were born, so even they didn’t always have much in common.
My mother is one of 4, including one unexpected ‘caboose’ uncle who is just 6 years older than I am. I was close him. He was like a cool older cousin or brother who could drive and would take me everywhere with him, including some of his college classes and to hang out with his college friends. I loved it.
I’m not close to any of my cousins on that side either, though. Again, we have nothing in common. Some became evangelical Christians who live out in the boonies raising their own chickens and pigs for slaughter. I was raised Catholic, grew up in the city, and get my meat the way God intended - in a package from the grocery store. 
A couple of other cousins had alcohol and/or drug problems.
Whether it be first, fourth, or double cousins, I guess it doesn’t mean much to me. The people I consider family aren’t necessarily blood related.
I agree with everyone else that it’s not at all rude for the young woman to ignore the request. One more thing…if you aren’t sure if she’s related AND your family has lived in the South for a long time and owned slaves, it’s possible that this person’s ancestors were owned by yours.
Additionally, there could be some family estrangement along the way.
A perspective from the other side.
I recently received a FB friends request from a nephew I have had no contact with in decades. His father is a putz and had resisted any attempts at establishing a relationship between the families. I ignored (deleted) the request. Mainly because I knew this young man and his GF would be in our area and were probably looking for free housing etc.
Anyway, the point being…sometimes people don’t have good experiences with family and the last thing they want is to expand that circle of ick.
I like meeting new people…I could have a cup of coffee with almost anyone. But if this cousin won’t, chalk it up to her loss and move on. She doesn’t know what she’s missing.
@jonri There really is no doubt the girl is related. She comes from a community of about 750 people, and a good chunk of those people share my last name. Unless adopted she would be certainly be descended from my Double first cousin twice removed.
@dietz199 I’m sorry you didn’t take the risk on your nephew; it might have been rewarding and you could have responded to the housing request with a firm “No.” I have a first cousin who grew up somewhat estranged from our extended family because his father was killed in WWII and his mother didn’t care for my grandfather. His youngest daughter, who I didn’t know even existed, contacted me a few years ago to ask about her family history and we got together. I’m glad I met her and by happenstance met her daughter a few months later. We stay in touch through Facebook a little bit.
Join ancestry and leave your kid our of it.
From such random encounters many good things may have occurred. A job lead, career advice, even just a suggestion for a good takeout restaurant or reliable mechanic in the neighborhood. I would like my kids to recognize that almost everyone has one interesting or useful thing to say, and is likely worth 15 minutes of your time-what do you have to lose other than a few minutes and perhaps the cost of a cup of takeout coffee. But that is just us, and obviously others disagree. Kudos to OP for trying-it might have made a funny story if they ended up as best friends or spouses someday!
I think a lot of posters here are saying that the approach should have been different and that may have resulted in a different result, as opposed to not reaching out at all. I think friending someone or following someone on social media, if that is the only contact made, is a pretty half-hearted attempt at best.