Week 38: Cousins

A cousin is a relative with whom a person shares one or more common ancestors. In the general sense, cousins are two or more generations away from any common ancestor, thus distinguishing a cousin from an ancestor, descendant, sibling, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew. - Definition from ISOGG Wiki.

     I am a little behind on posting for my 52 Ancestors prompts. I've been working on something really big with a few other genealogists called Project Genealogy. It is a YouTube series brought to you by genealogists discussing different topics as they relate to genealogy research. It will be released on October 4th. So if you haven't yet, subscribe to my YouTube Channel so you don't miss it.

     So as you could have guessed from the above definition, this week's prompt was Cousins. They are usually the first friends we have in our lives. On my dad's side of the family, I grew up with lots of cousins. My dad is the oldest of nine kids, so yeah the family started growing very quickly. From my Papa, we are up to five generations of the Fuchs family. Wow! That's a lot of cousins! Sometimes it's hard to keep track of who is related to whom. I just know, they are my cousin haha!
     With the growing popularity of DNA and many tracing their family lines, people are learning they have more cousins than they ever thought possible. Figuring out who you are related two is more tricky though than just saying 1st cousin, 2nd cousin, etc, which is what I've been saying all my life. Apparently, that's wrong! Oops!
     Thanks to many genealogists, there are tons of charts and explanations out there describing the correct relationships when it comes to our cousins. Thanks to the International Society of Genetic Genealogy Wiki website, we have a better understanding of cousins and how we are related to them. The chart below is from their page and can be used to help us better understand how we are connected to our cousins. Click on the image to make it bigger

According to their page, there is actually a mathematical way to determine the relationship between you and your cousins. I can hear my daughter groaning now, "No, not math!" haha! Here are some examples taken right from their page:

Example 1: If person one's great-great-great-grandfather is person two's grandfather, then person one's "number" is 4 (great + great + great + grand = 4) and person two's "number" is 1 (grand = 1). The smaller of the two numbers is the degree of cousinship. The two people in this example are first cousins. The difference between the two people's "numbers" is the degree of removal. In this case, the two people are thrice (4 − 1 = 3) removed, making them first cousins three times removed.

Example 2: If someone's great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + grand = 4) is another person's great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + grand = 4), then the two people are 4th cousins. There is no degree of removal because they are on the same generational level (4 − 4 = 0).

Example 3: If one person's great-grandparent (great + grand = 2) is a second person's great-great-great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + great + great + grand = 6), then the two are second cousins four times removed. The first person's "number" (2) is the lower, making them second cousins. The difference between the two numbers is 4 (6 − 2 = 4), which is the degree of removal (generational difference). ISOGG Wiki

As much as I love math, I think I will just stick to using the chart. For more information on the different cousin relationships, please visit their webpage: isogg.org/wiki/Cousin
I will close this blog post with a most recent picture of all of my Fuchs cousins. This was taken at Christmas last year (2018). And we are still growing...