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.

 

Spring Weddings!

As it turns out, today is a special day.

Do you have that happen when you're researching? - You're sat looking at a random ancestor and the date corresponds with something that happens in their life too?

I wonder if anyone has ever worked out the odds of that? - I know I wouldn't want that job. Coo, just think of the variables!

For me, I'm more struck with how often it seems to happen.

Today, of course is no exception, but it started yesterday.

Yesterday was one of those days that just reinvigorates the spirits and just gives a little fan to your genealogy flame. 

Out of the blue I was contacted on facebook by a woman with a mutual surname of interest (LOMBARDI - for those not in the know, Lombardi is to Italian Genealogy, pretty much what Smith is to English. ...only unlike Smith, there aren't really many folks looking into disentangling the family lines). 
She encouraged me to return to a facebook group and ask for some more help (since I've been sat stewing on that particular brick wall on paper for about 18 months and with DNA since roughly last October).
That led me to encountering a lovely lady named Faith, who was able to dig somewhere out of the bowels of Antenati, not only THE document to smash that brick wall, but documents to make light work of the next 2-3 generations too. 
It was a great day!

In the back of my head though, I still felt a little guilty. I've been mulling on a blog post for a while, but an approach would not be easy. Firstly, because I couldn't think of a way to tie a few things together, but then also because of a key issue of the moment.

Ten days ago my sister and her boyfriend of ten years got married, so I knew that I wanted this month's post to be a tribute to that. After all, why celebrate, track and record what went before if we don't equally celebrate the now and the yet-to-come?

Just one problem. Sis is a school teacher and in this digital day and age, we have to be particularly careful about anything online that relates to her, so unfortunately I can't share with you loads and loads of photos though it was a really beautiful wedding - very them. Right down to the ground though.

However, she did look amazing ...and this is my baby sister - and anyone who has a baby sister knows how ridiculously proud you always are of them, so while I acknowledge and celebrate my bias, I do want to show you this one shot that one of their guests was able to snap (it feels weird not to credit them, but we can't risk an accidental reveal) this lovely shot which should be safe:

Isn't she a beautiful bride?!

The skirt was her own and our Mum made the bodice piece for her. I saw the look on his face when she came in. It was all very much worth it.


I needn't have worried though. Inspiration struck this morning.

April 16th has always been a bit of a seminal date in my mind anyhow. Ever since we moved to the first house our parents owned on 16th April 1986 (while Mum was expecting my baby sis who just got married!).

Being only little at the time, lots of my memories jumble around that couple of days, but one of the handy little side effects has been that I've never forgotten that Mum and Dad's own wedding anniversary is the next day:

Keith S Laity & Ann Riches

17th April 1976

Central URC, Sheffield, Yorkshire

Marvellous - two events, both marriages, in the one month. On the way to a blog post I guess, but still...



...and then this morning I received a batch of messages on MyHeritage.
I don't know if anyone else gets this periodically or if I'm just the lucky one, but every now and again, I'll log in for something, typically after a few quiet weeks and find a string of messages from folks that I never got alerts about.
On this occasion this morning it's letting me have a clutch of messages dated back to mid-February. 

Among them, there was one from a lady I'd been speaking with back around Valentines day. She'd reached out because we have a DNA match of some flavour between about a third cousin point to something vague out from there (originally it was 3rd-5th, but oddly on there, as they've brought in all the awesome new features over the last several months, that guide has got to being a bit less handy than it was I reckon).

Anyhow, she and I match about 3% of our DNA and crucially, she also has a match with my mother, but not with my female second cousin who also tested (that side of our family having very handily placed identical twins along the line that really helps with narrowing the field!).

So we set out looking for a match around about second great-grandparents - fourth great-grandparents in the first instance. There was nothing immediately obvious, but we did seem to share a common surname: Brown.

The only problem was, 'our' Brown was Sarah and she was my Mum's 5th (and therefore my 6th) great grandmother. Given the shared DNA, that's really a couple generations out for a straight <any degree of> cousin relationship, but it does give us clues that we possibly descend through siblings. At that point though, all I had on Sarah's upward family group was a father's name: Thomas Brown. 
I don't know if you've ever tried looking for entries for a Thomas Brown, or a Sarah brown for that matter - or, indeed, for a Sarah Brown daughter of Thomas (or vice versa) in England, but if you ever have two-three hours to kill and no paint to watch dry...

I had thought the trail gone cold since we couldn't at that point be sure, but then, through the two messages that arrived this morning (which would have been the next day had we received them sequentially), it turns out that her nearest Brown ancestor, Grace Brown, also had a father Thomas, for whom the dates looked good.

A few hours on, across multiple platforms, and it looks as though we have a strong contender. What's even more astounding is, it was 273 years ago TODAY that Thomas Brown, the possible father of the sisters we seem to descend from, married Mary Frith.

Sadly there is no extant document currently publicly available online that covers their marriage, but they are indexed in the Nottinghamshire, England, Extracted CoE Parish Records, 1538-1837:

Thomas Brown & Mary Frith 

16 Apr 1745

Farnsfield, Nottinghamshire England.

He was 26, she was 24.

Now how's that for a coincidence?! ...and as himself just pointed out, my horoscope for today did say to look out for surprises in love. I'd say that qualifies.

So there we have it. Three different couples from the same family, over a span of 273 years, all choosing an early April wedding.

There must be something in the air!

2018 Looking Backwards and Forwards.

Happy 2018! 

Did you know we get a blue moon this month? I just love the idea of that. I'm fighting the temptation to go looking for who in our tree might have seen one before (though no promises over whether or not they were interested). 

2017 was a very big year at our end (and it somehow feels so long ago already) and pretty much nothing went as it should have, which makes for some strong memories, but in all honesty, I'm hoping this year's adventures are ...shall we say 'different'?

On Sunday 5th February we had trouble reaching Tof's Mum for our usual Sunday check-in with her. In the end the local sapeurs undertook a welfare check and established that in fact her doctor had admitted her first to the local clinic and then the hospital on the Saturday. Ironically, after having had to make a forced entry via the first floor living room window and searching the house, they found a note on her dining table asking the doctor to please inform us 'or else he will call the fire brigade who will come and break my windows getting in'. We were able to establish contact with the hospital and started to make plans to go out to her in a few days when they anticipated discharging her home.

The following afternoon we checked in with her hospital doctor who had been running tests. He wanted to run another the following day before advising on when we should come.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Within an hour he rang us back to explain that she had suddenly got very much worse and had died at 18.20 local time. He and a nurse had been with her at the end.

We spent most of February in France dealing with the funeral and related administrative things. It was difficult of course, but to be among the family is always a special treat, so that was nice.

Once we were home and settled, it was downhill all the way to our wedding in the summer.

Even with doing virtually all of it ourselves (and with the help of the family and our amazing Best Man, Best Woman and her lovely hubby), as well as taking the first two weeks of August off from everything, we just barely made it by the skin of our teeth (and that's before my darling husband got a spontaneous nosebleed requiring an ambulance in the early hours of the morning of our wedding day). 

We were gifted a two-nights honeymoon in Connemara by some lovely friends of the family and that was a very welcome break and ensured that we did see something of the end of summer - and we got to see the sea!

We had hoped that the tail end of 2017 would be calmer. Tof had booked himself onto some continuing professional development training as he wasn't feeling up to much work-wise (to say nothing of him going down with Shingles for his first time in late September) and we thought that was that, but sadly his brother Fabrice passed away unexpectedly on Sunday 8th October. Having his shingles Tof was contagious at that point, so unfortunately we were not able to go out for the funeral.

In late November and into December we started to get the first results in from the DNA tests that a group of family members took. We're really enjoying the whole voyage of discovery and seeing where it takes us. 

To date, Tof's has been the most astounding. Previous to the big MyHeritage update of a couple of weeks ago, he had exactly four matches. The very first one we looked into, we found a wonderful new cousin (of some sort) in lovely Vito. Our first person of interest is his Great Grandmother Rosina CARBONARO, who was born Rosina LOMBARDI. Based on her date of birth, she could well be a sibling of our brick wall Genaro LOMBARDI b. somewhere around 1880 (roughly). He's giving us some trouble though as it seems that he may have moved from somewhere else to Minervino Murge to be with Francesca CATALANO after they were married (there seems to be no record for that marriage in Minervino Murge), so until we can locate their marriage lines, we're a bit stuck there.

We are also slowly getting to grips with GEDmatch and are considering Promethease.

We closed out the year with a visit to my Mum's for the big double birthday and a family Christmas.

There were some cool things too last year. I was taken on as a volunteer helper in a few places including the Thursday Rangers and Adoption Angels team over at Wikitree and I've really loved meeting everyone at the British Isles Facebook group (among the far too many groups I joined, but then genealogy's never one for moderation) and even discovering I'm related to some of them! 

We took part in a really fun graveyard photography weekend for FindAGrave (highly recommend it as a great activity that all the family could join in on). I also recently got to help with tracing two WWI airmen for two ladies working on a book project in Australia and am providing genealogy and family history support for a commemorative arts installation in Devon later this year. 

We also feel that we're very close to reuniting the Sgt White photograph with his family. We're now as sure as we can be that it was Sgt White of the RAF, as opposed to the man from the Royal Signallers. We continue to look for modern relations (he had no children and his widow seems not to have married again).

We also acquired two new books this year. One was the personal book based on my Grandad's life story that I showed you a few weeks ago. The other one I picked up on the recommendation of a lady at the National Archives in Dublin, who called it "the Bible for Irish Genealogy". It's called 'Tracing Your Irish Ancestors' by John Grenham and while I'm taking it at a slow plod to read through, I find myself referencing it so often that it now lives within arm's reach of my desk.

In 2017 I acquired my first ever paying genealogy customers. Largely through Fiverr, but I also have one client on a longer-term private commission on a really cool project which I can't say much about at this stage, but it has me constantly challenged, baffled and sometimes incredibly excitable with some downwards genealogy from certain members of C19th Prussian nobility.

Last but not least, as of yesterday, I'm a member of the GeneabloggersTRIBE and I could not be prouder of that achievement. Thanks again to them for all their constant hard work in support of us all.

2017 Target:	2018 and beyond...
I did get a blog post in for January & in fact across the year I got 5 posts in, so that was an improvement of nearly 200% so I'm impressed with that all things considered	I have 2 posts so far in January (plus this one), so I'm claiming that as progress. I definitely want to keep to the one a month challenge this year, but I'm really hoping to actually hit all 12 this year.
HUGE amounts of manual data entry to cope with my GEDcom not playing on various platforms (or arguing with others' formats - I'm looking at you wikitree)	Yeah. That's a continued work in progress. It's a real challenge to fit in the time for it, but I am finding it works as an excellent check system for those daft little mistakes we all make and don't necessarily notice straight away. At least that's what I tell myself...
I was (and am) making some slow progress with wikitree, but there was also RootsMagic, GenesReunited, Family Tree Circles, GeneaWiki and various other places).	I'm still going on some of that. I do try to keep to the same handle across platforms (dlaity) so if you do see something on a mutual relative (or don't but think I might have it), definitely give me a yell and I'll try and help you out.
Update the paper tree when all the online ones are fixed	In all honesty, I never got to work on our paper tree at all last year. Hopefully later this summer?
Remember that nice mounting system for the paper tree that I dreamt up? I had three possible methods to make it happen: * I get cast in something that makes serious money * I find a craft or genealogy customer prepared to pay me in a custom size piece of perspex * I meet an art or woodwork student prepared to take on the challenge as part of their coursework.	I'm adding two new ideas to the 'how to make it happen' list: * Regain confidence with woodworking enough to make my own * Find and take some training in picture framing.
Finish off my four generations project for my licensing exam. - Shooting for sitting the May level 1 exam if at all possible.	With the way last year turned out, I didn't manage to get that all sorted (not that I'd have had the head-space to do a good job of it anyway). I did get it to somewhere between half and two-thirds written though, so I'm going to aim for the August sitting this year.
I wanted to create something else crafty (on top of my shawl pattern from the year before) and I wanted to start a book on Bad Billy.	I did start an outline on the book for Bad Billy, but it isn't really going as I'd like it too, so it keeps being sent to time out. I'm also frustrated by trying to work out if I can get a look at the Royal pardon for some kind of capital offence (hanging was the original sentence) that Billy was given shortly before his transportation. I also still can't resolve the ridiculously tight period between the trail going cold in Port Jackson and him being back in the West Midlands getting married. NEW: Try to work out how Tof and Vito connect by trying to work out how Rosina and Genaro connect.

What are your genealogy targets for 2018?