Who are your ancesters, by that I means, are parents, grand-parents, great-grand-parents and so on, your only ancesters, or are uncles and great-aunts and so on also considered ancesters even if you do not descend directly from them.
Thanks
If you do not descend from them then they are not your ancestors.
Concur.
I’m also tired of hearing “predecessor” used for people who aren’t dead yet, but that’s just me. 
I’d put ancestors at least to the great, great grandparent stage. Likely further though. The words connotation is of a long friggin time ago.
Merriam-Webster and OED both say “usually more remote than grandparent,” so “great-grand” or further back. I’d personally put it maybe one more generation back, maybe great-great-grandparent, or “the first generation of which no living person in your family has a memory.” In my case, those would be my great-great-grand-parents. If my parents were still alive, that would push it back probably one or two generations.
To the OP: No. Uncles etc. are not ancestors. Only people from whom you are descended are ancestors.
To CutterJohn and Earl Snake-Hips Tucker: Why do you put a limit on how far back? It seems to me that at least two of my ancestors lived a thousand years ago. Just because I don’t know who they were, why is that a reason not to call them “ancestors”?
I think they mean that’s a “lower” limit, not an “upper” limit. In other words, they wouldn’t call their parents their ancestors.
As you can tell from my username, mine go 'waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back.
[Emily Litella] Oh. That’s different. Never mind! [/Emily Litella] :smack:
I think “ancestor” usually is considered only to denote direct forebears, in other words, the set A including oneself and all parents of any member of A. To include collateral relatives (the descendants of any member of A who are not themselves in A – siblings, uncles, cousins, etc.) would ultimately lead to a definition where all living human beings are the ancestors of any other living human being: after all, there is at least one MRCA through whom any living person can be connected to another. This is not what is meant by “ancestor.”
I would say that I am my own zeroth-order ancestor, my parents are my first-order ancestors, my grandparents are my second-order ancestors, and so on. Carrying this to its logical conclusion, my children (if I had any) would be my negative-first-order ancestors, and my parents are negative-second-order cousins of each other, since they have a negative-first-order ancestor in common.
I would think that the opposite of ancestor should be cestor, but that leads to a weird place.
The siblings of your direct ancestors are indirect ancestors. This is sometimes important in societies with an aristocracy.
But, if your great-uncle is an important person, isn’t that only because your great-grandparents were important people?
I can trace my line back to the beginning of time.
At least according to Maori myth.
It goes back about thirty generations, I think. I hope every one of them count as my ancestors.
I’m going to disagree with everybody…
To me, ancestors include collaterals and adoptions; foreparents is limited to biological direct line.
And “everybody is related to everybody” doesn’t mean “everybody is everybody’s ancestor;” my uncle (per my definitions) would be my ancestor, but not my cousin, as my cousin is not one or more generations above mine. To be my ancestor, you have to be in my family tree one or more generations above mine.
Strictly speaking, your ancestors are your lineal antecedents - those from whom you are directly descended.
However it is sometimes - especially in a legal context - extended to include people from whom you have inherited , even if they are not your direct lineal antecedents. So if your uncle dies childless, and you inherit the family country estate from him, he becomes your ancestor. If he is still living, or if he dies and leaves the land to his own children, he is nor your ancestor.
Objection: I usually hear the word used in the context of someone who has taken a position previously held by another (his or her predecessor). And that is what the word is supposed to mean, regardless of whether the predecessor is living or dead. Not sure what you mean unless you are referring to the use of predecessor as a synonym for ancestor, in which case that usage is archaic according to M-W.
Bertie Wooster refers to his Aunt Dahlia as “old ancestor” in his coversations with her.
I guarantee you that there is some convoluted path you could take through your family tree that would put your cousin a generation above you, if you took it out far enough. It wouldn’t bear any resemblance to the obvious path, though.