What Do You Call Family
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Do you know what to call your family?
I like to do genealogy.
My family and friends often ask me questions
about what do you call so and so’s brother’s cousin’s half-uncle’s kid …?
I tho’t a blog about this topic might help other ppl too.
First, tho, so as not to offend anyone, I am writing this in very
elementary terms so that hopefully anyone who reads it can
understand whether or not they knew anything about genealogy previously.
Also, I am not making any social commentaries merely stating biological facts
when I say everyone has a mother and a father, whether they know who
that person is or not.
And in this case I will try to use the terms father and mother rather than the
colloquial dad and mom.
I’m also going to provide a generic chart bc it will be easier for me to explain that way.
As far as ancestors go, I think most ppl are aware of how the various generations are named: father – mother, grandfather – grandmother, great-grandfather – great-grandmother, great-great-grandfather – great-great-grandmother (sometimes also called 2great-grandfather – 2great-grandmother), 3great- … and so forth.
There are also two sides to everyone’s family:
- Paternal side (father’s side – think Paternity)
- Maternal side (mother’s side – Maternal=Mother)
(Note: ancestors are only those ppl directly involved with creating you, ergo NOT siblings, aunts, uncles, etc.)
So the order of the generations is:
- Father-mother
- GRAND father – mother
- GREAT – GRAND father – mother
- GREAT – GREAT – GRAND father mother
- Etc.
This DOES include naming of aunts and uncles, too.
When you are an aunt or an uncle, and your niece or nephew has a child, that child is a GRAND niece or nephew of you. Similarly when that child has a child, the new child will be a GREAT – GRAND niece or nephew of you.
Vernacularly, ppl say GREAT niece or nephew. This is technically and genealogically incorrect – there is no such thing. But it has become accepted as a colloquialism and as such should be considered slang.
Now I will use my chart to illustrate this next part visually:
| H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | |||||||||
| D | E | F | G | |||||||||||||
| B | C | |||||||||||||||
| A |
Sometimes ppl get confused as to whether a GREAT-grand parent is maternal or paternal. I’ll try to explain this using the chart and hopefully it won’t be too confusing.
If you stick with one person, make a certain person your Base person, in this case I’ll use myself as an example. I am person A.
My Paternal side starts with B; Maternal side C.
D and E represent my Paternal grandparents; H and I, J and K are Paternal GREAT-grand parents to me.
My father is represented by the letter B; his father is D, mother E.
Therefore, bc his Mother is E, his Maternal GRANDparents are J and K.
But he is NOT the BASE person we are talking about right now. We are talking about BASE person A, in this case me. so J and K represent Paternal ancestors bc they are on the Paternal side.
If B were our BASE person, J and K would represent something different and we’d extend the tree farther back to represent that.
Next time I’ll talk about all the nonsense about the whole “removed” language. A paternal uncle of mine likes to say “removed from what?”
I agree – it isn’t a very nice way to word things.
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