Thursday: 13 July 2006
Also in those comments MarkH at Biomes Blog (one of my several must-reads that catapult me into the morning) brought up an interesting problem. He said:
There’s a girl in my family who is a firewoman. Her mother is the daughter of my mother’s mother’s sister.
Is she my second cousin once removed? and is her mother my second cousin? Now this firewoman also has a daughter. Is she my second cousin twice removed?
I (and a couple of others) replied:
The firewoman is the granddaughter of your grandaunt, which puts her in your generation. You have a greatgrandparent in common so you’re second cousins, period. Another way to view it is that your mother and hers are first cousins and the children of first cousins are second cousins to each other, as David pointed out above.
Her daughter is in the next generation after you so she’s your second cousin once removed.
Her mother makes my head hurt, and here my intuition failed me. I had to draw it out.
But I think the reality is that to HER, you have a grandparent in common (your greatgrandparent). Her claim takes precedence over yours, so you’re first cousins, once removed.
In addition, your son, the Boy, is the firewoman’s mother’s 1st cousin, twice removed. The firewoman’s 2nd cousin, once removed. The firewoman’s daughter’s 3rd cousin.
Here’s a figure of the relationships (and I’m pretty sure they’re right
). Notice “David’s Diagonals”:
Later MarkH pointed out something else interesting:
I’m 41 and I have a first cousin, once removed, (the firewoman’s mother’s sister) who is one year older than me. She has a son who is five. So technically he and I are in the same generation (second cousins) even though there is a 36 year age difference. Wow. The next family reunion should be interesting once I get this conversation going.
Interesting because we normally think of people born in a particular timeframe as belonging to the same generation (baby boomers, X, Y, whatever). But in genealogical terms people 30-40 years apart in age can often be in the same generation, as MarkH and his 5-year-old second cousin are, and people very close in age, such as MarkH and his 1-year-younger 1st cousin once removed firewoman’s mother’s sister are not.
Dang, I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong about this. Debate at the Biomes Blog Family reunion depends on it!
Laura - email - url
This makes my head hurt - need more coffee.
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 09:25:51
Wayne - email - url
Laura - as Bev reminded me yesterday, it’s good to make your head hurt at least once a day.
Of course it’s unfair of me to make your head hurt twice in one week, for the same reason. More coffee!
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 09:30:25
Rurality - email - url
There is a non-headache method, too: Enter the data in a genealogy program and it’ll figure it all out for you!
That’s if you really want to know who all your 13th cousins thrice removed are.
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 09:47:49
Mark Paris - email
I have the feeling that this should be easy, but it takes too much thinking to figure it out. It reminds me of a cartoon that I can’t quite remember, but it goes something like this - A professor writes equations on a board in class, gets to a certain point and says something is obvious, then retires to his office for a long, long time. He comes out and says, “I was right - it is obvious.” Another version has one professor writing equations for a long time, then turning to his colleague and saying, 'You were right, it is obvious."
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 09:55:57
Mark Paris - email
I think it’s an old joke. Here’s one reference of several I found: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=obvious
Just because I had to google that joke does not mean that I am not obsessive.
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 09:58:46
Mark Paris - email
... “does not mean that I am not obsessive” but I must be freudian.
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 09:59:41
Wayne - email - url
Karen - Family Tree Maker isn’t my choice, but it is my father’s so I am consigned. It is good at data entry but terrible at editing and removal of branches to make new subsets.
Still. My interest, since I know of none of my cousins beyond 1st cousin, was to locate descendents of my grandmother’s siblings and so forth. And just by chance I found a fantastic website that my father (and especially my mother) is likely to drool over - my mother’s aunts, great and so forth grandparents, back to late 1700s. Now, suddenly, I have 3rd and 4th cousins (but nothing like 13th, which might, really, include you!).
But the piece de resistance - very few have moved from Alabama (Evergreen, Opelika, Notasulga, Tunnel Springs, Bay Minette, Troy, Dothan, etc.) for over 200 years. Gracious.
Of the few that have: Chipley, FL; Kirthwood, LA; Blakely, GA. Northcutts. What could you expect?
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 10:00:58
Wayne - email - url
Mark - no one would think you obsessive, nor fault you if you were 
The joke I remember along those lines was punctuated with “and now a miracle happens”.
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 10:02:28
roger - email - url
i took the warning about head hurting, which i do often enough anyway, and avoided trying to apply all this stuff to my family. but thanks for the diagram. maybe i’ll just squeez all my relations into your diagram.
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 11:29:29
Annie in Austin - email - url
After first stumbling onto your site, I returned for all the wonderful photos [the green pondhawk is breathtaking] and love reading the discussions on nature and nomenclature. Now it’s cracking me up to see you wander into genealogy, one of my long-term interests. I was a teenager when Aunt Fran explained what ‘first cousins once-removed’ meant and got me hooked. Like your father, I now use the Family Treemaker to keep everyone straight. My mom’s grandchildren have ages from 39 down to 7, not quite as wide a range for these first cousins as MarkH has for his once-removed group, but pretty close!
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 11:41:26
David - email
Actually, I cannot lay claim to “diagonals” in their chart form, as these were a discovery of Madame Curie as part of her less well-known endeavors in the field of visual aids. Verbally, however, “diagonal(ly)” may actually be my baby, and apparently DOES give a leg up to those who have gotten past “first”, “second”, “third”, but are still struggling with “removed”.
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 13:53:03
pablo - email - url
I like Biomes, too.
Thursday: 13 July 2006 @ 21:20:10
Wayne - email - url
Roger - I’m still not to the point of intuitively, blithely, glancing at a pedigree (whoops - that’s forbidden - maybe I should say family tree) and casually saying, oh sure, 3rd cousin 7 times removed. Nor am I sure I want to be.
David - weren’t there Feynman diagonals too? I’m not sure about him, but Curie certainly had quite a pedigree family tree.
Pablo - Mark comes up with the greatest things.
Friday: 14 July 2006 @ 08:08:50
Wayne - email - url
Thanks, Annie - I was bemused at a not-unexpected comment that suggested that an interest in genealogy meant you must be insecure and hope for salvation for your deficiencies from your more illustrious ancestors. While that’s interesting, my primary motivation, as someone who knows none of his relatives at this date outside of first cousins was to see if I could track backward and then forward and find some second and third cousins. I was especially interested in demographics.
For instance, I was both intrigued, and not just a little disturbed, to find that my mother’s mother family has lived in southern Alabama for over 200 years and virtually no one had left it up through the 1950’s. Ack!
Here’s what FTM shows (and I still haven’t figured out how to do subsets of family so this is a little misleading, since it includes family information from other branches. Nonetheless, the major US is awfully sparse.)
Friday: 14 July 2006 @ 08:20:52
