How are we related?

I have always wanted to know what you would call the relationship between myself and say my mom’s cousins. Or my children and my cousins, which yes is going to be the same thing. The other day I found out what it is and I thought that I would share. I did a little search on wikipedia. And if you don’t know what wikipedia is you better learn. Wikipedia.org is a great site to find out about pretty much anything. Don’t bother searching on google … start with Wikipedia! Lets start with the basics. What we do know:

• We all have/had parents – they brought us into the world and they can take us out
• And our parents parents are our grandparents
• Some of us have siblings and that is when two or more people share the same parents
• And our parents siblings are our aunts and uncles

With that in mind what makes our cousins our cousins. Is it because they are our aunt and uncle’s children? Or more so that we share the same grandparents.You and your cousins share the same grandparents making them your first cousins because there is only one generation between yourself and your grandparents – which is of course your parents. It’s all about sharing a parent or grandparent or great grandparent and so on.Let’s say that you have a child and your cousin has a child. What would that relationship be called?Well if you and your cousin share grandparents they in turn your child would share great grandparents, right? Now we count the generation gap between the common parent or grand parent and the two people in question. We already know there is one generation gap between yourself and your grandparents, so there would be a two generation gap between your child and their great grandparents – yourself and your parents. We use that two in front of the cousin and they would be second cousins.

Easy, no? But what if the generation gap between the two people and the common parent isn’t the same?

Let’s use the example of the relationship between your children and your cousins. We will break it done like these. Your children’s great grandparents are the same as your cousins grandparents, like so …

Your Children’s

• Great Grandparents are
• Grandparents are
• Parent are
• Them

Your Cousin’s

• Grandparents
• Parent’s brother and sister
• Cousin

So we now have a 2 generation gap and a 1 generation gap. These numbers are the key. We use the smaller of the two numbers in front of the cousin – in these case the 1. So they are first cousins. But that can’t be right because they are your first cousins … but we aren’t done yet. We take the two numbers again and minus them – getting 1 again. We use these number behind the cousin which turns into first cousins once removed. Once removed stating that there is a generation gap between them. Hopefully these makes sense but if it doesn’t there is a diagram on wikipedia that might help.

Click on the below image to see it larger and what you do is …

1. Figure out what common parent the two people share.
   
2. Find one person’s relationship along the top left.
   
3. And the other person along the top right.
   
4. When the two diagonal rows cross that is their relationship.
   

So if you share parents the two people are son and son and they cross at brother. If they share grandparents they are grandson and grandson and they cross at first cousins. Now go crazy figuring out the rest yourself!!

I hope you didn’t get too confused … and maybe you learned a little bit more about your family!!

Andrea