Welcoming baby Jack
A very big welcome to the newest edition to my family - Jack Peeter Heffernan. My ever lovely cousin Aeron gave birth after a brief 45minute labour - quite the feat!
Little Jack is the second bubba in the Heffernan-Pilli line after Thomas. This leads to my favourite topic - Genealogy! What relation do they bear to me? I am continually having this argument with people - what do you call your cousin's children?
Dear old Anthropology in first year, dear old Chris Gregory and his sacred versus profane, and most relevant to this conversation, dear old kinship.
Leaving the cultural anomalies aside (such as marrying your maternal parallel cousin) you describe your cousin in degrees (first, second or third) and by removes (once removed, twice removed).
Degrees - this is how many steps away your common ancestor is. If it is your grandparent then that is a first cousin. If it is a great grandparent, then it is a second cousin.*
Removes - this describes any generational gap. A great example of this is your first cousin's child - this is your first cousin once removed. Similarly, I would call my mum's cousin's my first cousin once removed. I would call my grandparent's cousin my first cousin twice removed.
So Thomas and Jack are my first cousins once removed. Quite the mouthful.
When you don't share an ancestor, technically you aren't cousins, although I've always called my cousin's cousin my second cousin.
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*If it is your parent then they are your sibling, you nonce.
Little Jack is the second bubba in the Heffernan-Pilli line after Thomas. This leads to my favourite topic - Genealogy! What relation do they bear to me? I am continually having this argument with people - what do you call your cousin's children?
Dear old Anthropology in first year, dear old Chris Gregory and his sacred versus profane, and most relevant to this conversation, dear old kinship.
Leaving the cultural anomalies aside (such as marrying your maternal parallel cousin) you describe your cousin in degrees (first, second or third) and by removes (once removed, twice removed).
Degrees - this is how many steps away your common ancestor is. If it is your grandparent then that is a first cousin. If it is a great grandparent, then it is a second cousin.*
Removes - this describes any generational gap. A great example of this is your first cousin's child - this is your first cousin once removed. Similarly, I would call my mum's cousin's my first cousin once removed. I would call my grandparent's cousin my first cousin twice removed.
So Thomas and Jack are my first cousins once removed. Quite the mouthful.
When you don't share an ancestor, technically you aren't cousins, although I've always called my cousin's cousin my second cousin.
Scarily, if my sister married my brother in-law (this is a pretty BIG if!) then our children and their children would be double cousins.
Piccie below is from Wiki and may vaguely help those of your still reading...
Tune in next week when I explain the difference between cross cousins and parallel cousins, and why you can't marry your cross cousins... or not.
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*If it is your parent then they are your sibling, you nonce.
posted by Miff at
2:47 pm
2 Comments:
I've always wanted to know this - what is my Dad's cousin to me?
So my old-fashioned-bev is my grandmother's brother's daughter - my Dad's first cousin. So...I'm useless at this stuff but would that make her my second cousin once removed??
I love that you're so smart :)
By
Anonymous, at 6:58 pm
Bev is your first cousin once removed. The picture helps a lot.
I love that I can regurgitate what I learnt at uni - that's not really that smart... just rote learning in action baby!
By
Miff, at 4:21 pm
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