My brother’s daughters are my nieces. My mother’s sister’s daughter is my cousin. What are my cousin’s children to me? What are my cousin’s children’s children to me?*
- Yeah, I know, I need to get a life.
Your (first) cousin’s children are your (first) cousins, once removed.
Your (first) cousin’s children’s children are your (first) cousins, twice removed.
And your children and the children of your first cousin are second cousins to each other.
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.
When you and your relative are different generations, it’s no longer symmetrical.
Descendants of oneself:
child
grandchild
great grandchild
great great grandchild
etc.
Descendants of one’s parent:
sibling
niece/nephew
grandniece/grandnephew
great grandN
great great grandN
etc.
Descendants of one’s grandparent:
uncle/aunt
first cousin
first cousin once removed
first cousin twice removed
first cousin thrice removed
etc.
Descendants of one’s great grandparent:
granduncle/grand aunt
second cousin once removed
second cousin
second cousin once removed
second cousin twice removed
etc.
Descendants of one’s great great grandparent:
third cousin twice removed
third cousin once removed
third cousin
third cousin once removed
third cousin twice removed
etc.
“Nth cousin” tells you how far back is the nearest common ancestor. (And if you and your cousin are different generations, it will be different depending on whether it is being reckoned from your point of view, or your cousin’s point of view.)
“N times removed” tells how many generations apart you and your cousin are.
If you can find a copy of the Encyclopedia Americana, the article under “Genealogy” has a nice tree diagram that makes this much easier to remember.
Ah! I found one:
Very informative! Thanks, everyone.
Oops! Forgot to put “great granduncle/great grand aunt” above the third cousins.
Also, with uncles and aunts, people often drop the “grand” and add another “great”. In my part of the country, you hear “great aunt” more often than “grand aunt”.
Parent’s sibling is uncle.
Grandparent’s sibling is granduncle.
Great grandparent’s sibling is great granduncle.
Grandparent’s child is uncle.
Great grandparent’s child is great uncle.
Great great grandparent’s child is great great uncle.
I have also heard terms like “second great uncle”, “second great grandfather”, and so on being used with increasing frequency recently.
On Star Trek: Enterprise, T’pol used the term “third grandmother” to refer to her great-great-grandmother - but of course, that’s probably just an English translation of Vulcan terminology.
Oh, and before you try to seduce your cousin, check your state’s incest laws to see how many degrees of cosanguinity are off limits. (Also, what method your state uses to determine cosanguinity.) The most commonly used method is to count the number of generations from yourself back to the common ancestor, then count the number of generations from the ancestor to your cousin. The total is “N degrees of cosanguinity” or “the Nth degree of cosanguinity”.
If three degrees are forbidden, then you are allowed to marry a first cousin. If five degrees are forbidden, then you are allowed to marry a second cousin.
I once figured out the relationship name between me and this man, named John Adam Kasson.
He is my third cousin, five times removed. In 1722 Adam Kasson emigrated to the US colonies with his wife and family, eight kids. I am descended from one of his sons, and John Adam Kasson was the descendant of another son. A distant relationship, but I used his name in a thread on this board, the first “Finish the Westen” story.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=174740&highlight=Finish+Western
Does anyone here happen to know how Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were related? I vaguely remember reading somewhere that they had a common ancestor who immigrated to America, several generations before Teddy.
I also read in a college-level U. S. History book that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were distantly related. :dubious: Does anyone here know anything about that?
“I have a distant cousin in New York, many times removed. Every time I go to visit him, he always removes.”[indent]-- Joe Btfsplk[/indent]
Teddy and FDR were 5th cousins, based on Wikipedia saying TR’s dad and FDR’s dad were 4th cousins. WGBH says FDR and Churchill were 7th cousins once removed.
–Kimble, Gerald Ford’s 6th cousin 3x removed
This site claims that Churchill and FDR were cousins twice removed.
If Churchill was FDR’s 8th cousin twice removed, then FDR was either 6th cousin twice removed, or 10th cousin twice removed, from Churchill’s point of view.
The websites I am finding are all secondhand information, and none of them shows the lines of descent.
FDR and Churchill are 8th cousins twice removed due to their common ancestors: Henry Howland and wife:
-
Henry Howland and Margaret(?) Aires
-
Arthur Howland, immigrant to Plymouth, Mass.
-
Deborah Howland
-
Hasadiah Smith
-
Deborah Russell
-
Dorothy Allen
-
William Wilcox
-
David Wilcox
-
Clarissa Wilcox
-
Clarissa Hall
-
Jennie Jerome
-
Former Naval Person
-
Henry Howland and Margaret(?) Aires
-
John Howland, immigrant to Plymouth, Mass.
-
Joseph Howland
-
Nathaniel Howland
-
Nathaniel Howland
-
Joseph Howland
-
Susan Howland
-
Mary Aspinwall
-
James Roosevelt
-
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Of course they have other cousin relationships:
[ul]
[li]They are 10th cousins once removed, FDR being 8-great grandson of Thomas Temple, Baronet and Churchill being 8-great grandson of Thomas’ niece Susan.[/li][li]They are 11th cousins, both being 10-great grandsons of Anthony Browne Viscount Montagu and Lady Jane Radcliffe.[/li][li]They are 11th cousins, both being 10-great grandsons of William Clifton of Barrington Court and Elizabeth Blount.[/li][li]Other, more distant relationships[/li][/ul]
No. Because “removed” operates in either direction, a person is the 8th cousin twice removed of his own 8th cousin twice removed.
The relationship is only symmetrical if you and your cousin are the same generation. Churchill and Roosevelt were two generations apart. That wrecks the symmetry.
The common ancestors are Roosevelt’s 7-times-great-grandparents. Therefore Churchill is Roosevelt’s 8th cousin twice removed.
The common ancestors are Churchill’s 9-times-great-grandparents. therefore Roosevelt is Churchill’s 10th cousin twice removed.
Cite: Encyclopedia Americana.
Okay, various ignorances fought!
I’m a bit surprised that TR and FDR are (allegedly?) cousins of the same generation. I would have thought that FDR would be a generation or two later than TR.
So we have conflicting ideas, however, about the naming of asymmetric cousin relationships. One view is that, even though a relationship is asymmetric, the nomenclature is symmetric and thus ambiguous. The other view is that, when a cousin relation is asymmetric, the naming convention preserves and accurately describes that, with a different label in each direction. That actually makes a bit more sense.
Churchill was only seven years older than FDR. Generations are not constant size; my wife is younger than her cousin’s children. After many generations, such “discrepancies” can become quite large.
Given the mere 7-year age difference, the “twice removed” in FDR and WLSC’s closest cousinship may be more surprising. But note that the lines contain 2 and 6 females respectively. Fathers are, on average, about 5 years older than the corresponding mother.
Now you’re just getting personal. 
(Ancestries of FDR and WLSC happen to be well-studied.)
You and I have given clear opinions, and I’d normally be happy to let the matter drop. Given the SDMB charter, however, I feel a duty to respond. 
Look at the table toward the end of Wikipedia’s page on “Cousin.” It only goes up to, e.g. “2nd cousins thrice removed” but you can see a symmetry across the diagonal that supports my position.
By itself, that doesn’t prove anything. After Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Americana, the score is 1 to 1. There’s more than one correct way to pluralize “buffalo”; if your view of cousin removal were to become the majority view it would become correct. But I’ve playing with genealogy for decades and am confident that if you, say, examine the first 200 Google hits of “explain cousin 2x removed” the score will become much more lopsided.
I’m also voting for septimus’s interpretation – i.e., if X is my Nth cousin M times removed, then I am X’s Nth cousin M times removed. More cites:
OED: UK, US, blog
Ancestry.com
the chart mbh linked to– note that it says the parent of your 2nd cousin is your 1st cousin once removed
The OED blog does mention mbh’s method as an “alternative system,” but I think it’s safe to say that it’s nonstandard, at least in current usage.
We had a family reunion at which, each year, it was tradition to take a picture of the oldest and youngest attendee together.
One year we had to take the picture again. My second cousin’s daughter was the youngest. But then one family arrived a little late, and their baby was a month younger than the first child. The two kids were from different generations though, we had a big family tree posted.
It started in the generation of my great grandmother, the mother of my maternal grandfather. She had a son who was about the same age as my grandfather, who was the child of my great grandmother’s oldest child, a daughter. So Grandpa’s uncle was the same age as he was. Kind of like in Father of the Bride 2.
In my opinion, the insistence on reciprocal titles introduces more complexity, and I don’t see that it conveys any more information.