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Family reunions are often filled with confused people
scratching their heads, ticking off fingers and mumbling, "If my mother's
aunt was her father's grandmother, then that makes us…"
If you can't keep your third cousins
and your first cousins twice removed straight, you are not alone. But there's a
simple way to figure out the relationships between relations.
First cousins share a grandparent, second cousins share a
great-grandparent, third cousins share a great-great-grandparent, and so on.
The degree of cousinhood ("first," "second," etc.) denotes
the number of generations between two cousins and their nearest common
ancestor.
The term "removed" refers to the number of
generations separating the cousins themselves. So your first cousin once
removed is the child (or parent) of your first cousin. Your second cousin once
removed is the child (or parent) of your second cousin. And your first cousin
twice removed is the grandchild (or grandparent) of your first cousin.
Clearly, it doesn't take many generations before your family tree
is a bit unwieldy. Case in point: Last year it was revealed that vice president
Dick Cheney and
presidential hopeful Barack Obama are eighth cousins. Cheney's wife, Lynn
Cheney, discovered this tidbit while researching her husband's genealogy for a
memoir she was writing, the Associated Press reported.
If these distinctions aren't confusing enough, first cousins
can be further parsed into parallel and cross cousins. Parallel cousins are the
children of same-sex siblings — for example, the children of your mother's
sister are your parallel cousins. Cross cousins are the offspring of opposite
sex siblings, such as your mother's brother's children, or your father's
sister's children.
And in case you were wondering, the two relatives at the
family reunion (A's mother's aunt is B's father's grandmother) are second
cousins once removed.
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