Thanks for the welcome! Much like you mentioned, quite a few of my dad’s first cousins were closer to my age than his. The youngest is four years older than me, so it was natural that we were close.
And one of my best friends in the world is one of his first cousins. She’s 15 years older than me and 12 years younger than him. We live 3k miles apart, but still visit at least once per year and keep in touch regularly. Even though I have no first cousins of my own, I’m very fortunate to have some great folks in my extended family.
I had 6 first cousins on my dad’s side, and 6 on my mom’s side.
One of the paternal cousins died many years ago (he was morbidly obese literally from birth - no, he didn’t have Prader-Willi or any other known genetic issue) from a heart attack in his 30s, but everyone else is still alive in their late 40s through 60s, and all of the kids/parents on both sides are still alive and kicking in their 80s and early 90s.
I don’t know. Two on my mother’s side, but my father had 6 siblings and I don’t know how many children they had. I can think of 3, from 2 sibs, no idea if they had more or how many the other 4 sibs had.
My mother’s side has a bunch, 29. Most all of the 34 grandkids (including our family with 5 kids) are within 20 years so I got pretty close to a number of them.
I had four on my father’s side, but my father wasn’t close to his two sisters and they grew up in California so I only met them a few times. I’m not even sure if my aunts on that side are still alive or not.