Friday 22 April 2022

Wait, How Are We Related Again? (How to Work Out Different Types of Cousins)

 Back in the spring of 1997, our family held the 'Great Laity Gathering' (GLG) in Marazion, Cornwall. It was organised by some of the American cousins, and was tons of fun!


One of the most useful tips I picked up from that event, was how to work out how any two people are related.

It's stood me in good stead all these years, and it's extremely helpful now that more and more people are doing genetic genealogy too, as it's a good way to take a fantastic resource like Blaine Bettinger's tool and simplify down to a nice, clean, 'If X is your ..... and my ..... we must be ???cousins'.


We can all grasp pretty easily what a cousin is (or a 'first cousin' to give it the proper name).

First cousins are two people who share one set of grandparents (or at least one single grandparent). 

Simple, straightforward, fairly easy to look on a family tree and trace a little triangle that shows 'these to people come from this one couple/person'. 


What happens when it gets more complex though? When more generations are involved, or when the two people we're comparing relate differently to the common ancestor?


The tip I learned from relatives at the GLG was:

Think of the family tree as though it was a map: Imagine it has a North (going up the tree as you go back in history), South (as you come down the tree and forward in time), East and West as the family spreads out sideways into bigger and bigger triangles (or lozenges).

For every 1 generation step up from grandparents, that's another degree of cousinship, so for example:
Two people share one set of great-grandparents, then they're second cousins, because we've gone up one more step from grandparents to great-grandparents.

Suppose two people share 4th great grandparents (three steps higher up from second cousins), they're fifth cousins.


There's also a quick cheat to this one as well if you're in a real hurry:
Add on 1 to the number of grandparents to know how many degrees of cousinship, i.e.

Great-Grandparents          2nd cousins

2nd Great-Grandparents   3rd cousins

3rd Great-Grandparents    4th cousins

4th Great-Grandparents    5th cousins

5th Great-Grandparents    6th cousins

...and so on.


That works just fine for comparing any two people who have the same relationship to the common person. If you and I happen to share Thomas Spencer from Coventry as a 2nd great grandparent, 
...well, first off, have we compared notes yet? - and if not, when are you free for a chat?
...but that aside, we would be 3rd cousins.

Suppose though that my 2nd Great-Grandad Thomas Spencer, is your 3rd Great-Grandad, but you aren't my nibling (there's currently only one on that side of the family, who is naturally the most amazing kid in the world, but 8mts IS pushing it a little for these purposes just now), then we know that there's an East or a West move somewhere in the trail between us, to account for why we're out of step with each other.

When this happens, what we do is look for the lower number of the two. In this example, that's the relationship between Thomas and me, which tells us that we're some kind of 3rd cousin.

To find out what kind of 3rd cousin we are, we need to work out how many generations the gap between Thomas and my relationship is, compared to yours and Thomas'. If Thomas is your 3rd Great-Grandad, then there's only one step of difference between us, meaning that we are 3rd cousins once removed.
If we were comparing me and your child, that would be 3rd cousins twice removed, and so on.


Sounds a lot, right? For visual thinkers, here's this particular example drawn out:


Pretty neat, eh? If nothing else, a fun party trick that you can use at your next family event to entertain Aunty Meg and her 4th cousin twice removed, your cousin Bailey*.







* In case of cousin fishers:
1) Hi! Let's compare notes;
2) You didn't loose your mind, Aunty Meg and Bailey don't belong to us. They're entirely fictional.


 


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