My grandmother was born near Banbridge, Co Down, in 1882. Meanwhile that same year, thousands of miles away over what was still being thought about as Darkest Africa, the night skies were paradoxically dominated by the bright, spectacular display of the Great Comet of 1882.
The former event was ultimately to result in me; the latter provided the only known example of a country being named in honour of a comet. Stellaland, "the country of the star", came into being 116 years ago today, on September 18th, 1883.
It so happened that while the Great Comet was very much in evidence, local politics in the region threw up two small Boer republics in the neighbourhood where nowadays Botswana borders South Africa. One, for reasons that to me at any rate remain obscure, was called Goschen and had its capital at Mafeking.
But in the case of the second, it proved difficult to find a name until someone suggested calling it after the most dominant current feature of its skies. Thus, a year later, Stellaland proudly established its capital at Vryberg.
It was a strange reversal of a common practice. Comets are often named after the persons who discover them, Shoemaker-Levi and Comet Hale-Bopp being examples from the recent past.
Alternatively, a comet may be named after someone who was the first to notice that two or more apparently unrelated apparitions in the sky were in fact regular recurrences of the same phenomenon: Halley was here a case in point, and so was Encke.
And occasionally, in a regime where the celebration of individual achievement may be frowned upon, another prescription may be found; as in the case of the Purple Mountain Observatory Comet, discovered some years ago by an astronomer in China. But rarely does a comet become an eponym for something else.
The recorded history of Stellaland, alas, is brief. Indeed we know little about this tiny country, except that it appears to have done little harm to anyone, and to have succeeded during its short existence in issuing, as new nations will, a set of postage stamps.
Two years after its establishment, however, Cecil Rhodes was organising the Cape-to-Cairo railway, and found that Stellaland and Goschen blocked his way.
To Rhodes, of course, such obstacles, albeit sovereign, were trivial, and he prevailed on the Cape authorities to dispatch an expeditionary force to solve the problem of his right of way.
Not a shot was fired in this little altercation, but Stellaland was abolished without more ado, and its territory was annexed to the protectorate of Bechuanaland in February 1885.