I don’t understand what a term such as “first cousin twice removed” means. Please enlighten me!
Also, where is the best place to start trying to trace your family tree?
Thanks!
If your grandparents are somebody else’s great-great-grandparents, then you are first cousins, twice removed. Unless that somebody is, of course, your great-grandchild. The level of cousinness measures how far you have to go back to have a common ancestor. Your zeroeth cousins are your siblings, you just go up to your parents. For your first cousins, you go up to your grandparents. For your second cousins, you go up to your great-grandparents. And so on, for all of the people who are descended the same distance from a particular ancestor as you are. If you are on different generational levels, removedness measures how far apart you are. Your sibling once removed is your niece, nephew, aunt, or uncle; that is to say, your sibling’s children are one generation farther from your parents than you and your sibling are; or you are one generation farther from the ancestors your parents and their siblings share: your grandparents.
There are some charts on the Wikipedia article that may help make it as clear as mud 
In short, “x removed” refers to being in different generations. If Person B is your first cousin once removed, he may be Person A’s grandchild while you are Person A’s great-grandchild (or vice-versa).
As J Cubed said, the first part (xth cousin) is the number of generations that you need to count back to find a pair of siblings. First cousins are first cousins because one (or more) of your parents is a sibling to one (or more) of their parents.
You always count the shortest path to siblings. If you’re talking about your long-dead first cousin seven times removed, you don’t call him your seventh cousin or anything like that. See below:
Generation 1: Mutual Ancestor
Generation 2: Long-dead Cousin's Parent Your 6xGreat Grandparent
Generation 3: Long-dead Cousin Your 5xGreat Grandparent
Generation 4: Your 4xGreat Grandparent
Generation 5: Your Great Great Great Grandparent
Generation 6: Your Great Great Grandparent
Generation 7: Your Great Grandparent
Generation 8: Your Grandparent
Generation 9: Your Parent
Generation 10: You
Generation 2 are siblings.
The shortest path to a sibling pair is from Long-dead cousin back one step to his parent, so that makes him a first cousin.
There are seven generational steps down to you, so that makes you seven times removed.
First cousin, seven times removed.
Long-dead Cousin’s kids would be your second cousins, six times removed. They’re a generation further from siblings, but a generation closer to you.
Your kids would be Long-dead Cousin’s first cousins, eight times removed.
That should be grandchild, not great-grand, and your grandparents are also the great-great-grandparents of your grandnieces and nephews without them being your first cousins, twice removed.
“Unremoved” cousins of any ordinality are of the same generation as you. Removals relate to the number of generations of difference.
Fpr examplw:
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Your first cousins are the chidren of your grandparents’ children other than your own parents.
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Your second cousins are the grandchildren of your great-grandparents’ children other than your grandparents.
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And so on.
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Your first cousin’s infant granddaughter is your first cousin twice removed.
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Your second cousin’s kid is your second cousin once removed.
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And so on.
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Your kids are “once removed” from your own cousins – they are your first cousins’ first cousins once removed, etc.
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Your first cousin’s kids and your kids are second cousins.
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Your second cousin’s kids and your kids are third cousins.
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And so on.
As it happens, the wife of a friend and fellow parishioner of mine and my wife’s was from southern Washington State, but owing to his and my interests in genealogy, we discovered that she and I shared a common ancestor from Founding Father days, and were in fact fifth cousins once removed.
“And what does that make us?”
“Absolutely nothing!”
Ask your parents what their full birth names were. And when they were born and where they were born. If your grandparents are alive, ask them the same questions, if deceased, get as much detail as possible from parents and then get copies of their birth and death certificates.
Once you get beyond grandparents, start checking out US census data.
Agree. Older relatives are the best and worst sources for information. Use what they tell you as a leg up (it’s much easier to find records if you know what you’re looking for), but also don’t put too much faith in them if the records seem to be telling a different story. Memory isn’t always accurate and sometimes there’s a reason why certain details have been omitted from the verbal record. Families don’t usually glory in their scandals. Mum might remember her Granny telling her that her parents were married for 40 blissful years, but Granny might have failed to mention the earlier wife who Great Grandpa never quite got around to divorcing, divorces being so expensive and difficult to obtain back then.
Also, spelling is something we get way more hung up on now. My Groombridge relatives appear as Grumbridge sometimes, my Wiltons have a variety of spellings that stray as far as Wilkey, and you don’t want to know what they do to my poor Dunwoodies (just mix and match vowels as you please - Dinwiddie, Dunwoodie, same diff.). One Great Grandmother’s given name appears in the records as Harlette, Harlettie, Harlotte (!), Charlotte and Lousia (that was her middle name… guess for a time she found it easier than trying to spell out Harlettie for everyone, because that’s the name several of her children’s birth certificates are recorded under).
If you know dates of deaths, check their local papers from around that time for death notices. You can pick up a lot of information from death notices.
Children of a common ancestor are siblings.
Grandchildren of a common ancestor are first cousins.
Great-grandchildren of a common ancestor are second cousins.
Great-great-grandchildren of a common ancestor are third cousins.
Etc.
If you and your relative are different generations from the nearest ancestor, the symmetry breaks down. You are still “cousins N times removed” but the “Nth cousin” will be different, depending on which of you is doing the reckoning.
Descendants of oneself:
Child
Grandchild
Great Grandchild
Great-great grandchild
Etc.
Descendants of one’s parents:
Sibling
Niece/Nephew
Grandniece/Grandnephew
Great Grandniece
Etc.
Descendants of a grandparent:
Aunt/Uncle
First cousin
First cousin, once removed
First cousin, twice removed
First cousin, thrice removed
Etc.
Descendants of a great-grandparent:
Granduncle
2nd cousin, once removed
2nd cousin
2nd cousin, once removed
2nd cousin, twice removed
Etc.
Descendants of a great-great-grandparent:
Great-granduncle
3rd cousin, twice removed
3rd cousin once removed
3rd cousin
3rd cousin, once removed
3rd cousin, twice removed
Etc.
Encyclopedia Americana has a neat tree diagram that makes this much easier to remember.
With the uncles and aunts, you can drop the “grand”, and add another “great”. To my mind, “great aunt” sounds better than “grand aunt”.
Good advice. But you’ve likely been informed by your closest relatives already, so I’d emphasize questioning aunts, great-aunts, cousins. I got in touch with gg-aunts almost 50 years ago (and they were very old then) and have much information I’d never have otherwise. Many people keep family records, many of which don’t appear on Internet.
If one of your ancestors married a Mormon (Latter-Day Saint), you might tie into their huge database.
The genealogical records of Daughters of American Revolution may be useful (and reliable, as they require authentication before making anyone a “Daughter”). Census images and transcriptions, DAR data, and much more are available at Ancestry.com. You need a paid subscription, but you may be able to get a Free 30-day trial or something and do your research quickly!
In “tracing your family tree”, will you be satisfied to get back to 18th or 19th century, or are you hoping for 16th century or earlier? I have little advice for the latter case, except to note that the vast majority of such connections you’ll find in Internet genealogies are conjectural or fraudulent.
You might be able to get to the 16th century along a single line (probably the all-male one), but trying to get a complete genealogy that far back would be prohibitive just on the basis of the vast numbers involved. You quickly reach a point where you have to deal with a significant fraction of the population of the planet at the time.
I see your point. Two of my great-great-grandmothers’ maiden names were Almira Harrington and Hannah F. Chaffee; both were documented as descendants of families whose ancestors were traced out by 19th/early 20th century genealogists. They alone gave me over 10,000 provable “ancestors” (many of whom were the same people appearing in different places in the lineages).
It helped that my family married late, generally stayed in the same locations, and documented family lines rather extensively. My double-paternal great-grandmother, who attended my parents’ wedding on her 96th birthday, was born in the Province of Canada shortly into John Tyler’s presidency across the border.