I think anyone who has ever done any cousin fishing has asked or been asked the question about degree of relationship.
Are you my first cousin once removed, no maybe you are my second cousin. The waters get muddied pretty quickly. Here is a short video that will help you become confident with explaining cousin relationships.
The name dusty roots and forgotten treasures is a subtle shout out to that. Most of my roots were dusty and forgotten until I set out to dig them up.
Every day I dig, and I am constantly rewarded with the discovery of amazing historic treasures. Not monetary treasures, I will never die rich, but I have a wealth that is incomparable to a stack of cash.
I connected with some cousins that I had never met before and not only has it been wonderful to connect with this newly reconnected branch on the family tree, I was also rewarded with being able to get copies of many priceless photographs.
Photographs I had never seen before. Photographs of people who have some of the same features that I do. Enough photographs to help fill in the gaps of photographs on one family line to the point that I now have a photographic timeline of NINE generations!
I’m always excited to connect with relatives because it gives me the opportunity to share the family history gold I find. On those instances where I find myself on the receiving end of such wonderful bounty it feels like karma is rewarding my genealogical good deeds. I get smiled on by the karma gods of genealogy a lot.
I have really been blessed.
To accomplish this great feat of 9 photograph generations it took a lot of people to share their treasures with me. I have had distant cousins mail me packages of photocopies from the opposite side of the country. I get emails from cousins filling my inbox full of priceless photographs decades old. I get text messages from relatives as they make road trips and can visit long forgotten family cemeteries that I may never get the opportunity to visit for myself.
Often in various genealogical groups I see people that are upset that people are not sharing with them on sites such as ancestry. I have not run into that a lot. Most people are very generous with me.
Lately I have been dedicating a great deal of my time on working on genealogy cases for others and less on my own. I discovered genetic genealogy and I fell down a wonderful rabbit hole of exciting new tools and uses for my love of genealogy and research.
Purely by happenstance I discovered the power of genetic genealogy while assisting an individual who showed up on ancestryDNA matches. Through messaging with a mutual cousin, I discovered this cousin was an adoptee in search of his biological family.
It took me a couple weeks to crack the mystery. It was a long and winding road that involved not just this cousin’s adoption but also the fact that his father was the child of an adoption like process also. Once I put together the scientific puzzle, I discovered a newspaper article that helped fill in further pieces and finally one of the older generation relatives revealed information that had been a poorly kept family secret for decades.
The cousin was happy to have someone finally tell him the truth about his parentage and I was overjoyed to have assisted in bringing him that information. I had a mission.
Shortly after the conclusion of this case I sent off an inquiry to join a non-profit organization called Search Angels and have now been spending my spare time assisting adoptees or estranged individuals use DNA and genealogical research to reunite them with their ancestral heritage.
Are you the product of an adoption confused by the process of figuring out who your biological family is? Consider search angels or a similar organization to help navigate the complex analysis of genetic information. You might even get me working on your case!
Are You My Cousin?
When it comes to ancestors things have a way of accelerating quickly from one generation one the next. What starts as one person with two parents, becomes four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great- great grandparents, and so on and so forth. At ten generations, a person has 2,046 ancestors. Each generation is twice the number of the generation that came before.
We have four basic types of blood relations: ancestors, siblings, aunts/uncles, and cousins.
Most of a person’s blood relatives are cousins. At any given time, most people will have thousands if not millions of cousins of varying degrees. First cousins, those who share the same set of grandparents will be the closest and share 12.5% of DNA. The more distant the connection, less shared DNA. Third cousins, who share a set of great-great grandparents, can expect to share less than 1% of DNA.
One thing I constantly struggle with when it comes to genealogy is determining how people are related. Even after decades of genealogy, I still use a cousin calculator for most extended relationships. The article below has a great explanation of how to calculate distant relationships.
How, exactly, are you related to the child of your great-great-grandmother’s sister’s son? We’ll explain the steps to calculating cousinhood.
Source: Counting Cousins: How to Calculate Cousinhood – Family Tree
Dusty Roots & Forgotten Treasures 