15 - 8 maternal and 7 paternal.
My mother is 1 of 4 but one had no kids. Her sister had 2 and her brother had 5 and adopted 1 (I counted the adopted one).
My father is 1 of 5. His sisters and one brother each had 2. His other brother had 1.
At least 24.
19 maternal and 5 paternal. But I don’t know anything about two of my father’s siblings.
What confuses things is that all of my first cousins are also my step-first cousins, since all of my aunts and uncles were also my step-aunts and uncles, since two of my grandparents were also my step-grandparents.
I have 9 first cousins, two of which were adopted.
Four cousins from Mom’s side (two sisters) and 5 (including the two adoptees) from Dad’s side (5 brothers).
One of my cousins was “adopted” out of the family. My ex-aunt remarried and her new husband adopted the kid.
Dad was one of 13. So I have or had, 30+
Adoption complicates things in my family… One uncle and his wife adopted a daughter before they had twins. My brother is adopted from one of my aunts. Another uncle adopted his wife’s daughter from her first marriage.
So by blood, I have 20 first cousins, but there are 21 people who were raised as my cousins. (8 on Dad’s side, 13 on Mom’s.)
I had three.
My mother had about seventy, all but one of them on her father’s side (he was one of fifteen children).
Her father/my grandfather had about 130 if you count halves; both of his parents were from large families with many full and half siblings. What gets really confusing is that some of his half-uncles and aunts were also his half-first cousins, therefore their children were also his half-first cousins. (His father’s half sister was his maternal grandfather’s second wife and her children were his mother’s half siblings as well as his father’s nieces/nephews.)
I have 17: eight from my mom’s side and nine from my dad’s. My husband only had two, both from his mom’s side. Our kids have three (my half-sister’s children), but they’re much younger and live overseas, so they don’t know them at all.
I’ve always loved having cousins, and I feel really close to many of them. Since my kids didn’t have any actual cousins while growing up, they ended up considering their second cousins as just cousins.
“Cousins” is a word that really starts looking funny after you type it a whole bunch of times.
I don’t know. I have one maternal cousin, and on my dad’s side there are/were eight cousins (two of whom died before the age of five) from my dad’s four siblings whose whereabouts are known.
Then there’s Uncle Roy. He had a buncha kids older than me (10ish?) by various girlfriends and wives, but he hasn’t been seen or heard from in 35 years because he fled to Canada to avoid being arrested for bigamy. I could have 40 cousins by now for all I know…
5 - 1 maternal, 4 paternal
All of them, man. We had to make our own entertainment when we were kids.
I had to guess as I lost count some time ago and they are still coming along. One of my Aunties is only 6 weeks older than my brother so there is quite an age range on mum’s side particularly.
One on my dad’s side, seven on my mom’s. My dad has a few half-siblings (not step) who have kids, but I’m not sure how many, but I think it’s only a couple, so the 6-10 is probably the best choice.
- All of them on my dad’s side. Mum has more siblings than Dad does, but she’s the only one in her family who reproduced.
Oops, when I said two, I forgot my dad’s family, because he’s not really close to them. My real number is about 5.
Here’s another snapshot of the distribution to compare with the one I took yesterday:
View Poll Results: How many First Cousins have you had?
This poll will close on 04-03-2014 at 10:27 AM
None 7 3.45% 3.45%
One 6 2.96% 6.41%
Two 9 4.43% 10.84%
3-5 33 16.26% 27.10%
6-10 56 27.59% 54.69%
11-15 30 14.78% 69.47%
16-20 17 8.37% 77.84%
21-30 24 11.82% 89.66%
31-50 16 7.88% 97.54%
Over 50 5 2.46% 100.00%
Voters: 203
===========================
The earlier version:
#58 Yesterday, 04:13 PM
Zeldar
Here’s a snapshot that may be fun to look back at after another batch of replies have come in:
View Poll Results: How many First Cousins have you had?
This poll will close on 04-03-2014 at 10:27 AM
None 3 2.63% 2.63%
One 3 2.63% 5.26%
Two 4 3.51% 8.77%
3-5 18 15.79% 24.56%
6-10 31 27.19% 51.75%
11-15 17 14.91% 66.66%
16-20 11 9.65% 76.31%
21-30 15 13.16% 89.47%
31-50 10 8.77% 98.24%
Over 50 2 1.75% 99.99%
Voters: 114
The 16-20 group (or it may be the 21-30 group) seems to stand out as not part of a “normal distribution” in both pictures. Wonder why that is.
Maybe we’ll have another point of comparison later…
Three. Dad was an only child, Mom has one sister, who had children by two different husbands. I didn’t realize when I was young that my cousins weren’t all full sibs.
If the chart linked to above doesn’t answer questions you may have about the whole issue of “cousins” then perhaps Cousin - Wikipedia can fill in those gaps.
If you have an even better presentation of the terminology and/or the degrees of “shared DNA” between people who are said to be kin to each other, please share it/them.
I would not be surprised to learn that the terms and methods used by ancestral researchers and geneaology experts would stagger the imaginations of the lay person. I do know from my own experience that families in the same geographical region may have entirely different ways of naming these relationships and of allowing even the most tenuous of blood kinship connections between members of their “kith and kin.”
Six by blood. One more by adoption when uncle adopted his step-grandchild.
10 maternal, dunno how many paternal. Made educated guess. Mom was 2nd oldest, dad the baby. I have to be reintroduced to those cousins whenever we see them.
Seven if I can’t count cousins by marriage. Two from my dad’s sister, three from his older brother’s first marriage and one from the second, none from his younger brother, and one from my mom’s brother’s second marriage. Counting cousins by marriage gets me three more, all from my mother’s brother’s third marriage.
If were to count the cousins I actually grew up with, I’d get to add 3 more, who are first cousins once removed, although one is biologically a second cousin once removed. Two are the children of my mom’s maternal uncle, and one from my mom’s maternal aunt (and her daughter). All my cousins on my maternal grandfather’s side lived elsewhere.