G4BB 69: Les Bérubé, s’il vous plaît

Les Bérubé, s’il vous plaît

69.1  After 68 posts on genealogy, I still enjoy it enormously…wouldn’t keep doing it if I didn’t. But today’s will be especially fun, since it’ll be pure analysis, as we examine the following family tree…

69.2  This originated from page 157 of Les Bérubé d’Hier et d’Aujourd’hui, Tome I, published in 1988 by L’Association des Familles Bérubé. What you see in Chart 227 has been modified by me…I removed several generations from the bottom, along with identifying numbers and other information. At the top is “DB”…Damien Berube, the “father” of all North American Berubes (to use the American spelling), along with thousands of other descendants with other last names…like me…my mother is a Berube…I am Damien’s 7G grandson. Damien came to Quebec from Normandy, France in 1671 and just below him are the 2 male lines he originated, Mathurin Berube on the left and Pierre Berube on the right. All Berubes living in the US and Canada today are said to belong to one or the other…or both!…of these lines. For the record, I’m a Mathurin.

69.3  And there are several things I’d like to call your attention to regarding the construction of this family tree. Since it is from a book that had no color printing, males are represented by squares, females by circles. Also, since the connections get rather tangled rather quickly, an interesting devise is used, as shown at left…when one connection crosses another, it jogs up then down in a triangular fashion…this means keep following this line, don’t veer downward.

69.4  Another convention is the use of a double horizontal line to connect 2 married individuals who are related to each other…and a single horizontal line when the are not. In fact, that will be our task today, to examine the 8 such marriages between relatives, and determine how the bride and groom are related to each other in each case.

69.5  Also interesting is how one man with 2 wives is diagramed…you’ll notice that this gentleman is not actually connected by a line to his first wife…the line arcs over and continues on to the second wife…but is assumed to be connecting the husband to both. I believe it was done this way because they wished to maintain the chronological order of the offspring and in this one case the wives…earlier to the left, later to the right.

69.6  But to start out, I re-drew Chart 227 as Chart 228, eliminating all non-related spouses…smoothing out the rough spots…and giving each individual a number…the red numbers show where the surname Berube was passed down along a male line. If you examine Chart 228 for a moment, you will see that the couple at the bottom, 51-52, are descended from the 7 1st cousins in the 3rd generation…5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. Mathurin and Pierre had other children, of both sexes, as did most of the others in succeeding generations…what this chart shows is basically the Berube pedigree of 51 and 52…that is, their direct lines, fathers and mothers who are descended from Damien. There are literally hundreds of collateral relatives that are omitted…the only collaterals that are included are 45 and his wife 46, plus her line back to 11’s second wife…these are there because, as I mentioned, the tree goes down several more generations…I just thought it would be fun for the sake of analysis to leave them in.

69.7  Chart 229 shows 4 of the 8 cousin-to-cousin unions, starting with 15-16. This couple are 1st cousins…which in those days was not as common as it once was, but hardly unusual…the Catholic Church had a long list of dispensations to allow such a match. I might mention that this union is not found in the charts I included the last time I wrote about my French Canadian forebears, in G4BB 28 and 29…those were marriages between a Berube and a Berube…here it’s Damien’s great grandson Jean-Baptiste Berube (4th son of Louis, who in turn was the 3rd son of Mathurin) marrying Marie Josephte Rousell, daughter of Louis’ younger sister Marie Genevieve Berube Rousell.

69.8  There are 2 interesting things about the next union, 31-32. Between 31 and his 2 ancestors among the “7 cousins” there are 3 steps, 15-23-31 as well as 16-23-31…but between 32 and her ancestor cousin there are 4 steps, 17-24-33-32. The uneven number of steps tells you right away what?…cousins removed! Thus 31 and 32 are 3rd cousins once removed…and that’s 2 ways, thru 5 & 7 and thru 6 & 7. It would be perfectly correct to call 31 and 32 double 3rd cousins once removed…31 is in fact a double 3rd cousin to 32’s mother 33. But that’s the second interesting thing: we generally think of double cousins as the result of a pair of siblings from one family marrying a pair of siblings from another…that’s doing it without interbreeding. But double cousins also result when previous relatives marry…in this case, 23 and 25 are brothers but also double 2nd cousins…23’s father is married to the 1st cousin of 25’s father…same with their mothers. For the purposes of this specific family tree, nobody is descended from just 5 or just 6…it’s always both, and that double relationship is passed down generation to generation. And of course, as double 3C1R, 31 and 32 are as closely related as 3rd cousins.

69.9   Next, something new is added with 40-41. 31 and 32, and thus 40, are descended from 3 siblings, the offspring of Mathurin. 41 is descended from those 3 siblings’ 1st cousin 9, daughter of Pierre. So altho we’re going down just one generation, we’re not going from 3rd to 4th cousins, but to 5th cousins…a generation is “added” at the bottom, but also at the top, since the common ancestor is not Mathurin, father of siblings, but Damien, grandfather of 1st cousins. Thus 40 and 41 are double 5th cousins thru 5 & 9 and thru 6 & 9, and also 5th cousins once removed thru 7 & 9….remember, the line thru 7 has that extra step.

69.10  This is a good time to reiterate that these relationships are cumulative, which is to say, they are all added together for a total Coefficient of Relationship. If only one relationship existed, thru 5/9, 6/9, or 7/9,  that one CR would be the sole CR, obviously…but that one relationship is in no way effected or diminished by the existence of 2 others…as I said, all 3 count, just as much as if any one of them actually were the only relationship. 40 and 41 have a CR of 5/4096, making them slightly more closely related than 4C1R (4/4096).

69.11  And now there’s a new twist the other way with 47-48…the steps from 48 to her ancestor in the “7 cousins” generations, 10,  is one step fewer than from 5 and 6…whereas the steps from 7 are one step more. The 4 relationships between 47 and 48 are based on ancestors that are siblings with one step difference (9 & 10)…1st cousins with one step difference (10 & 5, and also 10 & 6)…and 1st cousins with 2 steps difference (10 & 7). Thus, respectively, 47 and 48 are 4C1R…double 5C1R…and 5C2R. Total CR 13/8192, almost half way between 4C (16/8192) and and 4C1R (8/8192)…actuality, just a tad closer to 4C, since half way between 16 and 8 is 12.

69.12  Having done all that work, we find we needn’t reinvent the wheel with 45-46. We simply notice that 45 and 47 being brothers, everything that was true of 47-48 is true of 45-46, with one exception…there is one more step back to the “7 cousins” for 45’s wife 46 than there was for 46’s wife 48. And the presence of that extra step makes 45 and 46 only half as related to each other as 47 and 48 were…13/16,384. Which in real terms is practically nothing, but that’s genealogy, nez pah?  😉 😉

69.13   Over on the right side, 43-44 are, if you count it down, double 5th cousins, no muss, no fuss. And for 49-50, 8 enters the mix, the last of the “7 cousins” for us to consider.  Just as 43 and 44 were double 5th cousins, so are 49 and 50…true, they are one generation down, but their ancestors were siblings (5, 6, and 8)…while those of 43 and 44 were 1st cousins (5, 6 and 11). And of course 8 is also 1st cousin to 11, making 49 and 50 6th cousins…total CR 9/8192, just a smidge closer than 4C1R (8/8192).

69.14  Which brings us to the grand finale, 51-52…but once again, all the work has been done…it’s just a matter of matching up 51’s 4 ancestors (5, 6, 7, and 8) one by each with 52’s 5 ancestors (5, 6, 9, 10, and 11). That’s 4 x 5 = 20 different relationships, and I found it helpful to summarize the steps back to those “7 cousins” in Chart 233.

69.15  I’ve also reproduced my “work-sheet” in grid form, and if you refer back between it and Chart 233, I think you might notice some patterns emerging. If I’ve done the math right, I get 51 and 52 as double 4C…quintuple 6C…quintuple 7C… 5C1R…sextuple 6C1R… and 7C1R…for a total CR of 347/65,536…what that is precisely I leave to you as an exercise…no, it won’t be on the final exam. But if I might leave you with this one thought: these are real people, with real tangles in a real family tree…so get out of the hobby while you can!!  Back in a week…

wicked ballsy SHOUT OUT to berube grandchildren

As I mentioned, I am of the Mathurin line…I actually knew my great grandfather Joseph…called by the family “Papere” in the best of French Canadian tradition. I remember him as very quiet and very dignified…and very, very old…dunno if he ever said word one to me, but perhaps at age 80 (above) he had said all he cared to. His first son Henry was my maternal grandfather, and Henry had many 1st cousins on his father’s side…at least 40 that I know of…since Joseph and his twin brother Thomas (identical? fraternal?) were the youngest of 14 siblings.

Do you recognize any of the Berubes or others in the red boxes as a grandparent of yours? If so, your parent was my mother’s 2nd cousin, and you are my third cousin…and I’d love to hear from you!

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs dit really cool stuff by me…(a “dit” name… French for “said”… was a secondary surname used to differentiate families in Quebec, owing to the relatively small number of different surnames in use…) 

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com

G4BB 68: Smokin’ O.P.’s

= = = = = = Smokin’ O.P.’s   = = = = = =

68.1  Today, something a little different. As much as I like cooking up my own charts, I’d like to share with you some nice diagrams made by other people…hence O.P.’s, as in Bob Seger’s great LP pictured at left. Yup, smokin’ other people’s…your Uncle Louie’s favorite brand, right? Altho fans of punctuation will wonder how the apostrophe got above the N instead of after it…I guess it was an arbitrary decision made by someone in the art department. This LP came out in 1972 on Reprise…I have a copy re-issued on Capitol…and it represents the smokin’ hot, lean & clean rock style Bob employed before he hit the big time…and as good as his hit singles were, they sounded fat and lazy by comparison…compare “Let It Rock” with “Old Time Rock & Roll” and see what I mean…

68.2  The website is called “Thompson-Hayward-Snypes-Moore…Bringing the Family Together.”  (I’m feeling lazy, so I’m not linking…but if you’re interested, they’re all easily found, and I encourage you to check ’em out…) It deals with the families of the 4 grandfathers united when Edward Alan Thompson married Rebecca Ann Snipes in 1988. Almost all of it deals with the genealogies of these 4 lines, but one section explains kinship terms for those needing a refresher course…and the diagrams I think are especially well done.

68.3   How much clearer could it be? Then they tackle cousins removed, and again, it’s right on…excellent use of color to sort out the connections. There were 2 separate charts for once removed & twice removed…I have combined them below…

68.4  Next site is called “Kinship & Social Organization…an Interactive Tutorial”…designed by Brian Schwimmer, professor of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba. Basic introduction to the academic end of it, with an especially good glossary, for those who need to know their cognates from their agnates. Nice to see it’s still on the web, since it apparently hasn’t been updated since 2003. The charts below I thought give an especially clear explanation of matri- and patri-lineal descent, and altho color is used to illustrate this, these diagrams also serve as a reference to how charts can be done when color isn’t available….(the inset I got from somewhere else, not sure where, sorry…) Females are always portrayed as circles…males here are triangles…they are also sometimes squares…there’s an obvious mnemonic devise for remembering which is which, or am I being too obtuse?

68.5  Onward…and the title “Cousins, Removes, and Other Such Stuff” alerts you that this next site is going to be on the “breezy” side…so much so that the author does get blown off track a wee bit from time to time. You will find such delightfully inept phrases as “excess generations” and “almost unique.” And he makes some decidedly odd assertions…one of which I will examine in detail below. But despite it all, the basic information is completely sound and the charts are accurate. I almost get the feeling that he is perfectly willing to make a howling mistake, yet some internal intellectual governor keeps preventing it from happening. In fact, some of the topics covered are rather advanced, yet he doesn’t fumble. For example, while I’ve never heard of anyone thinking that being double 3rd cousins makes you 2nd cousins, I’m sure somebody thinks that, and it’s certainly laudable that he tries to head them off at that pass. (Double 3C, for the record, are as closely related as ½ 2C.)

68.6  These 2 charts, spider-webs and all, are correct…with the tiny exception that on the left, “great uncle” should be “grand uncle,” since for the succeeding generations he does use “grand.” What I find interesting is the use of the term “0th cousin” for sibling. In a purely mathematical context, this is fine…I’ve done it myself, with no apologies.  And those who aren’t afraid of numbers will no doubt find the resulting connections fascinating for both their symmetry and…yes…their beauty. But here’s what he says: “Every society has special names for certain close relationships and resorts to numbers only for the rarer or less important relationships. For some reason our society abhors the term “zero cousin” and, accordingly, goes to great lengths to avoid it; hence “great aunts,” “great grand uncles, ” etc.” 

68.7  Squirrelly, no? The use of “names” when “words” or “terms” would be more appropriate…the idea that “every society has…” when “some societies…” would be more accurate…the silly suggestion that “less important” relationships are somehow “rarer”…indeed, the average person’s family tree has far more 3rd cousins, say, than 1st cousins…and again the great/grand inconsistency.  But I must emphasize that despite such sloppy thinking, the basic kinship connections outlined in this article are correct, and thus I would rate this site useful and worth reading.

68.8  The part that really caught my eye I put in bold type…in the first place, the reason our society “abhors” the term “zero[th] cousin” was just stated by the author in his preceding sentence…siblings are “close relationships” and thus have terms to distinguish them from numbered cousins…altho, again, not in all cases…in Hawaiian for example, the same word applies to siblings and cousins. But in the 2nd place, society doesn’t really “abhor” 0th cousins, for the obvious reason that society has never heard of them…the simple act of counting universally starts with 1, not 0, and with good reason. And besides, the world is sinking deeper and deeper into a state of…what would the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy be?…innumeracy? And for some cock-eyed reason, is damned proud of it.

68.9  For example, people seem to take great joy in erroneously thinking that a million is a big number, when you’re talking in terms of trillions…or that a sports team’s 50th season is its 50th anniversary (was its 1st season its 1st anniversary?)…or one of my favorites, that an interest rate of say 7.99% is better than 8%…on a $20,000 purchase, the former saves you a measly $2 over the latter…do the math…$1598 versus $1600 in interest. Personally, I think this anti-math fad really heated up when everyone got the year wrong for the turn of the century…it was 2001, not 2000…and I must point out that they had it right in 1901…check old newspapers if you don’t believe me. Perhaps it’s a backlash against the way the world has been transformed by that ultimate mathematical contraption, the computer…who knows?

68.10  But please don’t get me wrong…anyone who’s interested in 0th cousins is OK in my book…I’d just as soon they took a more realistic view of the whole affair, that’s all. Displaying consternation that the whole world doesn’t think 0th anything is cool…is, well, as I said, odd.

68.11  Finally, from a website dealing with wills and estate planning, “Degrees of Kinship By the Rules of Civil Law.” A very concise diagram, and unlike the preceding site, it uses the “greats” with respect to uncles/aunts consistently…altho I prefer the “great grand” terminology to “great great.”

68.12  This is a good opportunity to once again untangle the ambiguity of the word “degree.” As used with cousins…1st cousins being 1st degree, 2nd cousins being 2nd degree, etc. …it’s one thing. But when applied to relatives in general, it means something else, as you can see…1st cousins are 4th degree, 2nd cousins are 6th degree, 3rd cousins are 8th degree, and so forth. This civil degree system is a way to compare all relatives, both direct and collateral, both forward and backward, in one neat and tidy ranking….you simply count the steps from YOU to the relative in question. You might, for example, have a local law that says you cannot serve as a juror if the defendant is related to you within the 6th degree…this chart shows you what that encompasses…it certainly doesn’t mean 6th cousins, for that would exclude far too many people to be practical…even if it were known who those relatives were, which is highly unlikely.   

68.13  But while this chart is completely correct, one curious thing emerges: it deviates in spots from the fractional Coefficient of Relationship, which is mathematically derived from the fact that everyone has 2 parents. For example, between you and your parent, as well as between you and your sibling, the CR is ½…yet here, parent is of degree 1, and sibling is degree 2. And while the CR between you and a grandparent is 1/4, here a grandparent is of the same degree as a sibling, which has a CR of ½. Would you like to know why this is? If not, skip ahead please to 68.15.

68.14  The reason for this discrepancy is that this basic chart is of a very old origin…back far enough that relationships were reckoned unilineally…that is thru one parent only…and not bilinealy as we do today, thru both parents. Thus, what is called a “sibling” in this chart is in fact a half-sibling…a person who has the same father as you, regardless of your mothers….whether they are the same or different isn’t relevant.  And as I’ve said before, full siblings are really “double half-siblings”…2 individuals with the same father and the same mother. Here, every relation in a red box is actually a half-relation…thru a father’s line only, not thru a mother’s…and seen this way, the degrees jibe with the CR…for instance, your half-sibling and your grandparent both share with you a CR of 1/4, and indeed by this chart both are of degree 2. But for the purposes such a chart was constructed, blurring fulls and halfs does no real harm…and thanks so much for your interest!

68.15  Next week, some really hard-core chart-work…which I hope you will nonetheless find of practical and instructive value…and a special shout-out to my Mom’s side of the family…till then, I’ll make like a tree and go… 

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…the genealogy lamp is lit…

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com

G4BB 67: Maildrop R.F.D.

                  

»  »  »  »   Maildrop R.F.D.   «  «  «  «

Dear G4BB: You always say “2nd cousins are the children of 1st cousins”…well, everybody says that. But then why isn’t the child of your 1st cousin your 2nd cousin? You…and they… say it is not, but instead it is your 1st cousin once removed. This seems like a contradiction to me…care to disentangle? …from Wooly, in Bullyburg

67.1  Dear Wooly: My privilege and pleasure. But here’s the thing: it’s all well and good to correct a mistake…but understanding why the mistake was made in the first place is better. Heck, I do that all the time…I seldom make a mistake without going back and trying to see how and why I did that. And it helps, believe me…it’s how a person learns.

67.2  Thus I have wondered long and hard about the origin of the common mistake, thinking your 1st cousin’s child is called your 2nd cousin. My explanation is I think pretty reasonable. But your question raises another possibility, one that simply hadn’t occurred to me…which I will get to in a moment.

67.3  I believe 3 simple ideas simultaneously, altho certainly not consciously, lead to to the 2nd cousin mistake…

               idea 1: there is such a thing as a 2nd cousin
               idea 2: the number 2 comes after the number 1
               idea 3: the child of a 1st cousin has to be called something

And that something must “logically” be a 2nd cousin…what else could it be? Well, if you don’t know how the “removed” terminology works, then indeed there doesn’t seem to be anything else it could be. But if I might digress slightly, “idea 3” needs some explanation…after all, there is something else you could call your 1st cousin’s son…and that is “the son of my 1st cousin”…just that simple. In English, there may not be a specific word for such a relationship…the best we can do are phrases with numbers and the word “cousin.” But this doesn’t mean we can’t refer to or talk about such a person…we obviously can, and quite clearly and unambiguously. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the idea that English “lacks words” for various relatives is true only in a very narrow sense…specific words, yes…ways to communicate the relationship and indicate to whom they apply, no…we don’t lack those in the least. In fact, a language that has specific words for “maternal grandfather” and “paternal grandfather” may not have a word that means just “grandfather” at all! It’s then a matter of opinion which language is the “poorer.”

67.4  Thus this “what else could it be?” way of thinking results in the 2nd cousin mistake. It is an “educated guess,” and when you ask a person who makes this guess about what other relatives would be called, especially a real 2nd cousin, your parent’s 1st cousin’s child, you generally find they are guessing about those as well, and will eventually run out of guesses…there is no coherent system involved, because this isn’t something they think about or care about very much. And those do who decide to care about it very soon come to understand how our kinship terminology is arranged, which is my whole point.

67.5  But now let’s examine the simple statement: The children of 1st cousins are 2nd cousins. One thing I have learned in life, never underestimate people’s ability to misunderstand even the simplest declarative sentence. You do it, I do it, we all do it. So this definition of 2nd cousin could mean one of 2 things…

                (A)  The child of my 1st cousin is a 2nd cousin to me.

                (B)  The child of my 1st cousin is a 2nd cousin to my child.

And there’s the problem: …is 2nd cousin TO WHOM? I have always, correctly, taken the definition to mean: if a pair of 1st cousins each have a child, those children are 2nd cousins to each other…paralleling the case where a pair of siblings each have a child, and those children are 1st cousins to each other. But now that I really look it at it, the definition surely could be interpreted as “The child of my 1st cousin is a 2nd cousin…to me”…since those are the only people explicitly mentioned in the definition: me, my 1st cousin, and my 1st cousin’s child. Yes, my child is implied….implicitly mentioned, if you will… but if you don’t see that, you get it wrong.

67.6  Thus, in the definition: The children of 1st cousins are 2nd cousins, it’s the word “children” that causes the problem…it’s meant to mean the children of me and my first cousin, our children…in other words, the children of each of a pair of 1st cousins…but it could be taken to mean just the children of my 1st cousin…and in that case, who else could they be 2nd cousins to but to me? As Travis Bickle might say, there’s nobody else here! Yes, we’re getting pretty involved with this…but explaining to someone what this particular wording of the 2nd cousin definition really means, might in fact be their eureka! moment…oh, so that’s how it works…now I get it!…I was reading it all wrong…

67.7  Here’s what to remember:  a cousin is your generation…a cousin removed is somebody else’s generation…in other words:  a cousin is your cousin…a cousin removed is somebody else’s cousin…

67.8  And certainly much of the confusion people have in understanding what removed cousins are stems from the fact that what we call them is based on how they are related to someone else, not you. They aren’t really cousins, in the sense of them being your cousins. Depending on the generation, they are more like uncles/nephews if once removed…grand uncles/grand nephews if twice removed…great grand uncles/grand grand nephews if 3 times removed, etc. And in practice, a parent’s first cousin may be called “Uncle Bill” or “Aunt Zenobia,” since they are of the same generation as a parent’s siblings.  

67.9  Also keep  in mind that one person by themselves cannot be a relative….you can’t have a father without a son, or an uncle without a nephew…and if both your parents were an only child, you don’t have any 1st cousins, and can’t be a 1st cousin to anyone. So for you to be a 1C1R, you have to have a 1C1R “on the other end”…in this case, one of you is the 1st cousin of the other’s parent….using the terms ascending and descending tells which is which, just as father/son and uncle/nephew distinguishes the generations.  It’s a cumbersome system…and the Spanish system of 2nd uncle/2nd nephew…instead of 1C1R ascending/1C1R descending…does it more simply and logically…occasionally you’ll see this terminology used in English…too bad we can’t all get on board that train. [But see today’s Wicked Ballsy…]

Dear G4BB: dopeGEEK got another one…  from Shontelle, in Sebastopol CA

67.10  Dear Shontelle…I see it, yeah…and just for the sake of argument, let’s build it up
step by step…starting with his dad’s brother…which isn’t really a “Conan relation” since the questioner obviously wishes to distinguish said gentleman from his mom’s brother…and they have the right. The fact that he’s married to somebody in your family kind of gives it all away in terms of potential blood relatives, but let’s see it thru…

67.11  Now here’s the other half, my grandfather’s sister’s husband…that being your parent’s aunt and your grand aunt. Putting these 2 halves together, Chart 223a, it seems natural for you and your boyfriend to be on the same generational level…except that leaves your grand aunt and his paternal uncle on the wrong levels. Hooking them up, Chart 223b, reveals you and your boyfriend to be of different generations…or you would be if you were blood relations, which you aren’t…your families are linked only thru marriage. If you must, you can call your boyfriend your parent’s 1st cousin-in-law, making you his 1st cousin once removed-in-law….maybe  better to say 1st cousin once removed by marriage, altho that’s a tad confusing…still, you asked.

   

Dear G4BB: My husband and I are having an argument…we understand that if male identical cousins married female identical cousins, their respective children, altho 1st cousins, would be as closely related as full siblings. But my husband says they’d be even closer related than that, since they’d also be double 1st cousins…being the offspring of 2 brothers marrying 2 sisters. I think he’s gone too far on this. Please settle!  …from Beanie, in Cecilville

67.12  Dear Beanie: It’s certainly true that with identical twins, genetic and genealogical relationships no longer jibe. And as I suspect you appreciate, this is because the twins are genetically identical, and thus can be considered as one single person. If each of 2 female identical twins has a child with a different husband, these kids are genealogically 1st cousins, but genetically half-siblings, since from a genetic point of view, it is the same as if the 2 different husbands had each procreated with the same woman.

67.13  Thus in Chart 224, X and Y are 1st cousins…but unlike normal 1st cousins, their Coefficient of Relationship is 1/4, not 1/8. Genealogically and genetically derived CRs usually match…but when they don’t, genetics wins out, since that’s what we’re talking about in the first place. Now let’s see what happens when the female identical twins marry male identical twins.

67.14  Your husband is right that, as seen in Chart 225, X and Y are genealogically double 1st cousins, since their parents are 2 brothers who married 2 sisters. But once again, the presence of identical twins bumps up the CR, in this case to the equivalent of full siblings. Genetically, it as if we are dealing with just 2 individuals, not 4…see Chart 226.  Seen this way, there is no increase for double 1st cousins since there are no uncles or aunts, hence no cousins at all…genetically, the offspring of both couples are siblings. The bump-up from double 1st cousins to full siblings has already taken the increase due to double 1st cousins into consideration…and indeed gone beyond it. Next week, a change-o-pace…smokin’ o.p.’s…chow till then…

Wicked Ballsy

Props to 2nd Uncle Kalen…he’s got it…

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…or Bob’s your second uncle…

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com

G4BB 66: Auntie dumbGEEK’s Cousins

Auntie dumbGEEK’s Cousins

66.1  Dear Friends: Yes, the mailbag is bulging, and we will take a stab at de-bulging it some next week, I promise. Today tho I want to look back to G4BB 24: All Answered Up, from June of last year. That was a line-by-line critique of an article trying to explain “cousins” on a website called wiseGEEK. This enterprise was started in 2003, 2 years after Wikipedia, designed to be organized not around topics but around specific questions. The piece on cousins is here…and as I did last week with Uncle Wiki, I did a “typewriter ribbon” review…black and red…both to correct the misconceptions, and as an example of the kind of muddle-headed nonsense you’re likely to encounter on the web when researching basic genealogical concepts.

66.2  I recently looked back on it to see if anything had changed…nope, altho I noted a section of examples I left out, plus a  final paragraph that is so awful, I must have omitted it thru sheer traumatic amnesia. In all fairness, and for the record, I’ll include those parts now…wiseGEEK in italics…

66.3  Here are some examples of levels of cousins with removals:

• Jane has a grandparent who is the great grandparent of Joey.
• Jane and Joey are first cousins once removed.  [1]

• Jane has a grandparent who is the great, great grandparent of Jim.
• They are first cousins twice removed.  [2]

• Jane has a grandparent who is the great, great, great grandparent of John.
• They are first cousins three times removed.  [3] …and Holy Guacamole! All correct, as per my Chart 218.
  
• 

66.4  Levels of cousins without removals always mean the common ancestor has the same relationship to each cousin. Examples include:

• First cousins—two people share a grandparent
• Second cousins—two people share a great grandparent
• Third cousins—two people share a great, great, grand parent. 

• Fine, as far as it goes…yes, 1st cousins certainly do share a grandparent…trouble is, so do siblings, half-siblings, and half-1st cousins. So it doesn’t work in the other direction…2 people who share a grandparent may not be 1st cousins, but something else. Duh, double-duh, and triple-duh.

66.5  And finally…Cousinship here is determined from European and American standards.  Not so…in Spanish for example, 1C1R are called 2nd uncles/2nd nephews…2C1R are 3rd uncles/3rd nephews…1C2R are grand 2nd uncles/grand 2nd nephews, etc. Levels of cousins may be different in other cultures, no they are not something different, altho they can be called something which is not directly translatable into English…and the term cousin may not even exist in certain world cultures. Um, there is no world culture, certain or otherwise. It can get a little murky figuring out these relationships, well, this is murky for sure…I think they’ve gone from talking about that imaginary “world culture” back to how we do it in English…and figuring kinship in English is murky only if your brain is murky…and some people essentially avoid the issue and just call any relatives they know of as cousins or second cousins. I think this means either everyone from 1st cousins on is a “cousin”…or anyone beyond 1st cousin is a “2nd cousin”…they’re thinking of “distant cousins,” a term for which there is no specific definition…it’s true, we do this in casual conversation…but then genealogy isn’t meant to be casual. From a genealogical standpoint, this isn’t quite correct, in other words, it might be accidentally correct, but then you wouldn’t know that anyway, so what’s the point?…but still implies family and relationship. The implication being you’re related to your relatives…good old implications, you can’t beat ’em for shucks.

66.5  This truly is a dumbGEEK article…dead wrong in spots, and awkwardly written…no GEEK worthy of the name would be associated with such a jumble. Then comes postings from readers, mostly asking questions about how people are related. In past G4BB blogs I have answered each and every one, with an explanation and a chart, altho when I tried to tell the folks posing the questions at wiseGEEK, I was not allowed to link to or even refer to another website. Why they keep asking questions without getting answers is beyond me…but 3 more cropped up…so here we blindly go…

66.6  I am going to make an enormous leap of faith…perhaps unwarranted, but there ya go…and assume that you, your boyfriend, and the cousin who is both yours and his…are not all cousins on the same side of the family. I mean, in that case, for all I know your boyfriend is your brother…hoo hah! So what you’re describing here, as in Chart 219, is 2 people, your boyfriend and you, who have a common cousin thru different sides of that cousin’s family…you thru that cousin’s father (which is how I interpret your comment about your uncle) and your boyfriend thru that cousin’s mother. If this is indeed the case, you and your boyfriend have no blood relation whatsoever. You call your boyfriend’s blood aunt “aunt” because she is married to your blood uncle…and the reverse is true of your boyfriend. But between the 2 of you sweethearts: nada…and congratulations.

66.7  This one is very similar to the last one. The key term here is “married”…once your aunt married that guy, all bets are off…you may call him “uncle” because he is married to your aunt, but neither he nor any members of his family is a blood relative of yours. To emphasize this point, I have imagined that they have a daughter “Daisy.” Daisy is your 1st cousin on one side of her family, her mother’s…Daisy is also 2nd cousin to “mystery daughter” on the other side of her family, her father’s, the guy your aunt married. But needless to say, despite sharing a 1st/2nd cousin, you and “mystery daughter” are not related.

66.8  Not knowing your sister, who can say? Sorry, just kidding…seriously, I love this question, because it raises once again the issue of what I have called “phantom relatives.” Isn’t “my cousin’s brother” also your cousin? Isn’t “my uncle’s brother” also your uncle, if it’s not your father? Isn’t “my wife’s husband”…you? Coincidentally, this topic is covered in that same G4BB 24 I cited above…where I call them “relatives that don’t exist.”

66.9  But I have an even better name for them: “Conan relatives.” This is thanks to a cameo-like lady, user-named Maximum20Characters (which is actually 19…) who supplied the following witty…and completely correct…response to a question on the net:

OK, 99.99% correct…in the normal course of events, your cousin’s sister is your cousin. I might simply and humbly point out that some cultures have different words for a male 1st cousin and a female 1st cousin…and when translated into English, these may come out as “cousin sister” and “cousin brother.” Or these terms could have an even narrower meaning, that of “parallel cousins,” the children of one’s father’s brothers and mother’s sisters…the idea being they are 1st cousins you can’t marry…they are thus in the same category as actual siblings…whereas you can marry “cross cousins,” the children of one’s father’s sisters and mother’s brothers.  And the questioner did say “cousin sister” not “cousin’s sister.” But it amounts to the same thing…in-laws aren’t related by virtue of someone marrying someone…if they are related, it’s something prior to becoming in-laws. (Bear in mind, there are the terms “brother cousin” and “sister cousin,” which apply to siblings whose parents are themselves cousins, such siblings thus being some manner to cousin to each other.)

66.10  The important point here is that there are other explanations for a Conan relation, beyond it being merely the product of sloppy writing or thinking. For example, “my uncle’s cousin” might make sense if this uncle was your father’s brother, but your father was dead. True, dead relatives are still your relatives, but it might be said that way when talking about real people in a real-life situation. Or if you have an especially close relation to cousin Fred, and not with another cousin, that being Fred’s sister, then saying “my cousin Fred’s sister” would be understood by people who know you. And this is especially true if “cousin” is being used in an imprecise way…it could be a half-cousin, a cousin removed, or maybe even just a close friend of the family that is not blood relation at all…what’s called a “fictive” relation.

66.11  And as a pertinent example of this…on The Andy Griffith Show, Andy’s habit of referring to any sister of Aunt Bee as “her sister” rather than “my aunt” got me started on the track of their true relationship, which turns out to be 1C1R…Bee is Andy’s father’s 1st cousin, not brother, as is universally, and erroneously as it turns out, supposed…see here.

66.12  But further, what I wonder about is whether, taken literally, such a phrase as Malek’s “my brother’s sister” might be referring to his half-brother’s full sister (which of course would still be his half-sister, or just “sister”) or even more logically to his half-brother’s half-sister on the other side of the half-brother’s family, the same way that a person can have 2 sets of cousins on the 2 sides of his family, cousins that thus aren’t related to each other. Malek’s case could be that shown in Chart 221. You can verify that the “sister” is not a blood relative to Malek…and that the “cousin” is not a blood relative to either Malek or his “brother.” Maybe it wasn’t as crazy as it sounded after all!

66.13  Which brings us to wiseGEEK post #49…there are a myriad of possibilities because there are so many variables…cousins on the same side or different sides…full brother, full sister, or half-siblings on the same or different sides as each other and/or as the cousins…or something. I will diagram only the 2 extreme cases…everybody on the same side, and everybody on different sides. Done thus, your answer is: by Chart 222a, yes, 5 happy cousins…by Chart 222b, no, everyone is related only to those on their immediate right or left, and to none of the others. See yez in 7…

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…taking sides in the nuclear Family Feud…

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com

G4BB 65: Uncle Wiki’s Cousins

Uncle Wiki’s Cousins

Dear G4BB: I was reading thru the Wikipedia article on “Cousins”…some of it seemed to make sense, altho much of it was confusing. Would you care to critique it?  …from Lolly, in LaLa-Land

Dear Lolly: Soitenly! And you’re right, some of the basic information is sound, altho there are some strange twists and turns, and anyway, anyone who relies solely on Uncle Wiki for his knowledge of the world is, I believe the technical term is, a “doofus.” In what follows, everything in italics is taken verbatim from the site you cited, with my comments in red. Several of the charts have been changed to a straight text format, to make commenting on them easier. And the whole deal starts with this disclaimer:

65.1  This article has multiple issues. “Issues”? Well, at least it doesn’t have any “problems”!  Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.

It needs additional citations for verification.  Hoo boy!…see comments below. Tagged since March 2011. 

It needs attention from an expert on the subject. WikiProject Genealogy or the Genealogy Portal may be able to help recruit one. Tagged since November 2008. It’s interesting that in 4 years, nobody has stepped up, at least not to the satisfaction of this tagger.

It may contain original research. Tagged since March 2010

65.2  Wikipedia is supposed to be a “people’s encyclopedia,” that anyone can contribute to. If you have ever tried however, it will quickly occur to you that Uncle Wiki more resembles a full-blown cult…and I’m hardly the first to have said that…replete with various levels of “door-keepers” and “key-masters.” And perhaps the most bizarre rule the acolyte will encounter is the threshold for inclusion: verifiability, not truth. Something that is true, but not verifiable, as defined by their labyrinthine algorithm of “citations,” cannot be included. Just try it, and see how fast your “correction” gets “de-corrected.” And as the above disclaimer suggests, what constitutes sufficient verification is a source of constant argument and controversy among Wikipedians themselves…well, man is the “rule-making” animal, nez pah?

65.3  But equally problematic is Uncle Wiki’s refusal to include what it calls “original research.” As an example, I have in the past several postings of G4BB pointed out that “sharing 2 grandparents, but not a parent” is not a reliable definition for “1st cousins,” which is to say “full 1st cousins,” since double half-first cousins also fit this definition. A simple diagram demonstrates this fact…it is what philosophers and other academics call “true upon inspection” or “palpably obvious.” But short of finding it explicitly stated in a published source…a book, newspaper, scholarly journal, etc. …it is not Wikifiable, hence not “true.” Is it any wonder Wikipedia is free…who in their right mind would pay for such a mess? But on to the meat of the article…

65.4  In kinship terminology, a cousin is a relative with whom a person shares one or more common ancestors. This is completely wrong. It says that all blood relatives are called cousins. And sure enough, the very next sentence has to “take it back.” The term is rarely never!!! used when referring to a relative in an immediate family in which there is a more specific term (e.g., mother, father, sister, brother, etc.). Not only that, but beyond the “immediate” (do they mean “nuclear”?) family…uncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces are never “cousins” either.  The term “blood relative” can be used synonymously and establishes the existence of a genetic link. No, a blood relative is not the same thing as a cousin, pure and simple. This introductory definition is complete nonsense…it is categorically not the way speakers of English use these terms.  Wow, go figure!

65.5  Now it’s true that our system of kinship can be translated into a mathematical system using only the term “cousin,” modified by degrees such as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc…levels of “removed”…and the terms “ascending” and “descending.” Such a system is completely logical and labels each relationship unambiguously. Thus siblings are called “0th cousins”…that’s “zero-th.” An uncle is a “0th cousin once removed ascending,” and a grand nephew is a “0th cousin twice removed descending.” Further, you yourself are your own -1th cousin…which is to say, (-1)th…thus your father is your “-1th cousin once removed ascending”…your grandson is your “-1th cousin twice removed descending,” and like that. And as strange as this system seems, it is the self same kinship system as we employ…we substitute more practical and individualized terms for the mathematical ones. Such an “everybody-is-a-cousin” system would thus appear to be a mere academic exercise, a mathematical curiosity at best…but in truth, it does underpin the straightforward formulas we can use to relate various levels of relatives to one another. But I doubt that’s what the writer of the goofy definition of cousin above had in mind…he hardly seems smart enough…and at any rate, it is completely out of place as a standard definition of “cousin.”

65.6  Systems of “degrees” and “removals” no, “removeds” are used in the English-speaking world to describe the relationship between two cousins and the ancestor they have in common. Various governmental entities better to say: civil law, church law, and conventional genealogical terminology have established systems for legal use yes, and everyday use as well that can handle kinships with common ancestors existing any number of generations in the past, though common usage often eliminates the degrees and removals and refers to people with common ancestry as simply “cousins” or “distant cousin.”  This is true as far as it goes, but awkwardly stated, especially the part about “common usage.” Again, grand uncles and great grand uncles are never thought of as cousins…as the siblings of someone in our direct line of descent, they are given special terms, and that’s that. Precise cousin designations are indeed abbreviated in common parlance, but that doesn’t change what they are as formal kinship relationships. And there certainly are situations where you wish to be precise about who’s related to who, and our kinship system allows you to do that.

65.7  By extension, the term “cousin” can also be used when referring to the genetic relationships between humans and any other form of life, as per the theory of evolution of all life on Earth descending from one common ancestor. However, the term in this sense is most commonly restricted to the fields of study surrounding ecological genetics. This part is nutty…yes, and taken further, the horse is cousin to the donkey…and the Sun is cousin to the Moon…so what?…that’s poetry, not kinship.

65.9  Basic definitions: The ordinals this word refers to numbers when used as rank, or to arrange things in a specific order…as opposed to numbers used as quantities or amounts…its use here ought to be explained  in the terms “first cousins”, “second cousins”, “third cousins”, describe the “degree” of the cousin relationship. The degree of two cousins’ relationship is determined by the number of generations to their closest common ancestor. The concept of half-cousins is being ignored, and for simplicity’s sake, so be it…but genealogically, this is not a trivial consideration…for example, half-1st cousins are descended from 7 grandparents, and hence 7 families, not 6 as with full 1st cousins, since the fathers of these cousins are half-siblings, not full siblings.  When the cousins are not the same generation, they are described as “removed”. In this case, the smaller number of generations to the common ancestor is used to determine the degree, and the difference in generations determines the number of times removed. Note that the ages of the cousins are irrelevant to the definition of the cousin relationship. OK, technically correct, but again clumsy and hard to understand…you can appreciate why that opening disclaimer remains in place…

65.10  Chart:  Term…Definition…Example

First cousin…The children of two siblings…Bill and Sally are first cousins because their fathers were brothers. 

Second cousin…The children of two first cousins…Bob and Sarah are second cousins because Bob’s father, Bill, and Sarah’s mother, Sally, are first cousins 

Third cousin…The children of two second cousins…Brian and Stephanie are third cousins because Brian’s father, Bob, and Stephanie’s mother, Sarah, are second cousins. These 3 definitions are fine. As a consequence, shared grandparents, great grandparents, etc. will indeed come into play, but this is the clearest way to define it.

First cousin once removed…Two people for whom a first cousin relationship is one generation removed…The rest of these definitions are not fine…as a matter of intellectual clarity, you cannot define a term by using that same term in the definition…it’s like saying a “house” is the thing that people who live in houses live in…or that a “horse” is what a baby horse grows up to be…if you don’t understand what these convoluted explanations of “removed” are driving at, I’d say you’re pretty darn smart! …Bob and his father’s first cousin, Sally, are first cousins once removed to each other. They are one generation removed from the common generational relationship between Bob’s Father (Bill) and Sally. 

First cousin twice removed…Two people for whom a first cousin relationship is two generations removed…Brian and his grandfather’s first cousin, Sally, are first cousins twice removed. They are two generations removed from the common generational relationship between Brian’s grandfather (Bill), and Sally. 

Second cousin once removed…Two people for whom a second cousin relationship is one generation removed…Brian and his father’s second cousin, Sarah, are second cousins once removed. They are one generation removed from the common second cousin relationship between Brian’s father (Bob) and Sarah  It’s a shame, because this is the point where people wishing to more fully understand our kinship system often get tripped up…and there are many simpler, clearer, more intuitive, and hence more useful ways of laying this out…none of this part is wrong per se…just unhelpful in the extreme.

65.11  Asymmetric definitions. The dyadic honestly, it sounds like this writer is trying more to impress eggheads…and doing a right bumbling job of it…than to make himself understood…run, dear friends! run away as fast as you can! For the record, a “dyad” is just a “pair”…2 things related to each other in some particular way. It’s like what in certain card games is called  a “doubleton.” Normal people should expect to go thru their entire lives without ever uttering the word “dyad” definitions of cousins in the previous section are common but not universal. When you think about it…and at this juncture what’s the point, really?…it’s hard to know what they’re talking about. As the spiel continues, it appears they mean not everyone is content with the generational confusion…older or younger?…inherent in the term “once removed.” I would merely suggest that when dealing with kinship, and the precise way in which people are related to one another, the desire to remove ambiguity certainly is universal, and thank goodness for that. As with other relationship definitions, e.g., father-daughter; aunt-nephew, some people wrong! Not “some”…all, and that’s all civil law, all church law, and all genealogists who have any sense about them prefer to use an asymmetric terminology that defines both the relationship and the roles played by each person in the relationship. In this case, the degree of the relationship from cousin A to cousin B is determined by the distance from A to the common ancestor and the number of times removed is the difference in generations between A to B. Sometimes “upwards” or “downwards” yes, this is used…more commonly, it’s “ascending” and “descending”…and there are other terms too…one blogger said their family always used “augmented” and “diminished” (a musical family?), the latter term comically morphed into “demented” is used to indicate the direction of this difference. For example, if A has a grandparent whose sibling is B’s parent, then B is A’s “second cousin, once removed (upwards)”, whereas A is B’s “first cousin once removed (downwards)”. Oops…this is flat out a mistake…I’ll be charitable and call it a typo. As my Chart 217 shows, the underlined word should be first…

65.12 Additional terms…The following is a list of less common cousin terms.

Double cousin… Double first cousins arise when two siblings of one family reproduce with two siblings of another family. The resulting children are related to each other through both parents’ families. Double first cousins share both sets of grandparents in common “share…in common” is redundant and sloppy, I don’t care who you are and have double the degree of consanguinity of ordinary first cousins. Children of double first cousins are double second cousins to each other. This could be taken to mean the children that double 1st cousins have with each other…here at G4BB I use the gentle euphemism “interbreeding”…but it actually means double 1st cousins having children with unrelated mates. And after all, if your parents are double 1st cousins to each other, you will be quadruple 2nd cousins to your siblings, not double 2nd cousins.

Half-cousin…Half-cousins are the children of two half-siblings and their respective partners e.g., the children of two half-brothers and their wives (or two half-sisters and their husbands). They left out “or a half-brother and his wife, and a half-sister and her husband”…but are you surprised?

Step-cousin…Step-cousins are either stepchildren of an individual’s aunt or uncle, or children of one’s step-aunt or uncle. 

Cousin-ln-law…A cousin-in-law is the spouse of an individual’s cousin, or the cousin of one’s spouse. 

Maternal/paternal cousin…A term that specifies whether the individual is one’s cousin on the mother’s side (maternal) or father’s side (paternal).

65.13  A “cousin chart”, or “table of consanguinity”, is helpful in identifying the degree of cousin relationship between two people using their most recent common ancestor as the reference point. Cousinship between two people can be specifically described in degrees and removals by determining how close, generationally, the common ancestor is to each person. This chart is correct, altho it would be more practical if, for example, “great great great great grandparent” were written “4G grandparent.” And to be technically accurate, every “cousin” in this chart is a “half-“…

65.14  Canon law relationship chart: Another visual chart used in determining the legal relationship between two people who share a common ancestor is based upon a diamond shape, usually referred to as a “canon law relationship chart”.

The chart is used by placing the “common progenitor” (the person from whom both people are descended) in the top space in the diamond-shaped chart, and then following each line down the outside edge of the chart. Upon reaching the final place along the opposing outside edge for each person, the relationship is then determined by following that line inward to the point where the lines intersect. The information contained in the common “intersection” defines the relationship.

For a simple example, in the illustration to the right, if two siblings use the chart to determine their relationship, their common parents are placed in the topmost position and each child is assigned the space below and along the outside of the chart. Then, following the spaces inward, the two would meet in the “brother (sister)” diamond. If their children want to determine their relationship, they would follow the path established by their parents, but descend an additional step below along the outside of the chart (showing that they are grandchildren of the common progenitor); following their respective lines inward, they would come to rest in the space marked “1st cousin”. In cases where one side descends the outside of the diamond further than the other side because of additional generations removed from the common progenitor, following the lines inward shows both the cousin rank (1st cousin, 2nd cousin) plus the number of times (generations) “removed”.

In the example provided at the right, generations one (child) through ten (8th great-grandchild) from the common progenitor are provided; however, the format of the chart can easily be expanded to accommodate any number of generations needed to resolve the question of relationship. No problems here that I can see, altho it’s so wordy, I may well have missed one. And for once, there’s a legitimate reason why half-cousins are omitted…as defined by Catholic Canon Law, half-‘s are considered the same as fulls. Still, such labels as “gg son” and “2 gg son” are confusing…one might wonder what the “2” in “2 gg son” means when there are also 2 g’s in “gg son.” Clearer would be “g gson” meaning “great grandson”…or better yet “1g gson”…followed by “2g gson,” “3g gson,” etc.

65.15  Mathematical definitions: There is a mathematical way to identify the degree of cousinship shared by two individuals. Each “great” or “grand” in the description of one individual’s relationship to the common ancestor has a numerical value of 1. 

Example: If person one’s great-great-great-grandfather is person two’s grandfather, then person one’s “number” is 4 (great + great + great + grand = 4) and person two’s “number” is 1 (grand = 1). The smaller of the two numbers is the degree of cousinship. The two people in this example are first cousins. The difference between the two people’s “numbers” is the degree of removal. In this case, the two people are thrice (4 − 1 = 3) removed, making them first cousins thrice removed.

Example 2: If someone’s great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + grand = 4) is another person’s great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + grand = 4), then the two people are 4th cousins. There is no degree of removal, because they are on the same generational level (4 − 4 = 0).

Example 3: If one person’s great-grandparent (great + grand = 2) is a second person’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + great + great + grand = 6), then the two are second cousins four times removed. The first person’s “number” (2) is the lower, making them second cousins. The difference between the two numbers is 4 (6 − 2 = 4), which is the degree of removal (generational difference). Well, this is probably correct, but don’t quote me…it’s so tedious, I’ve lost all heart. I should point out that the chart that accompanies it is actually illustrating 2 different meanings of the word “degree”…degrees of cousinship in the boxes, and degrees of overall relationship, which are the small numbers to the upper left of each box…so the chart isn’t specifically germane to the mathematical point being made.  And there is one labeling error, as I have noted…it should say “Grand Uncles Aunts”…

65.16  And that, dear and patient friends, is where it ends, except for a few random, and trivial, examples of famous cousins. And if you think this is bad, try clicking on the “talk” tab, at the very top on the left, to see how unworkable this “anyone (in theory) can play” philosophy really is. Don’t get me wrong…I use Uncle Wiki a lot, but only as a starting point, to roughly orient myself to a subject I want to learn more about. But that’s why Wikipedia is such a joke among people who are seriously interested in any subject whatsoever. And remember what they say: reading it on the internet is like hearing it on the telephone…and if you call up enough people, chances are you can piece together the straight story eventually. Regular mailbag questions continue next week…peace out, cuz’…

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…not available wherever Wikipedia is sold…

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com

G4BB 64: Not Related How Again?

>>>>  Not Related How Again? <<<<

Dear G4BB: I keep reading that humans and chimpanzees share 98% of their genes…and all humans share 99.5% of their genes with each other…yet I only share 50% with my daughter. Can you explain how this can be?   …from Puzzled, in Platypus City

64.1  Dear Puzzled: Yes, yes I can. You are confusing genetics and genealogy. Genetics tells you what you have…genealogy tells you where it came from. Confusing the 2 yields the following paradox: genetically, everyone is virtually identical to everyone else…and yet everyone is almost completely unrelated to everyone else, even most of their relatives.  

64.2  You hear the word paradox thrown around a lot these days, intended to mean something that is confusing or mysterious. Strictly speaking, a paradox is a situation which on the surface seems to make no sense…seems impossible…but when investigated further, turns out to be correct and completely true. A paradox indicates that people don’t really know as much about something as they think they do…their innate grasp of a subject, and hence their erroneous gut reaction, is not all it could be.

64.3  A perfect example is the Lottery Paradox. Suppose you buy a ticket for a lottery in which a million people have entered. Your chance of winning is one in a million…it’s extremely likely that you’re not going to win. Trouble is, this is true of everyone entered in the lottery…none of them has any real chance of winning. And yet…guess what?…somebody has to win…and somebody does win…despite the million-to-one odds. This paradox illustrates that our instinctive understanding of odds and probability, at least in this case, isn’t very trustworthy.

64.4  Now our DNA contains 23 pairs of chromosomes…each pair consists of 2 duplicates. Each chromosome is made up of a series of genes, and between the 23, we have between 20,000 and 30,000 genes. Technically we have twice that, but only one of the 2 duplicates will be active or as they say “expressed”…that is, only one of each pair will determine our physical makeup. Before the Human Genome Project, the number was estimated to be as high as 100,000. Of each pair of chromosomes, one came from your father, one from your mother…so Chart 213 shows a simplified closeup of one pair of chromosomes, father’s on left, mother’s on right.

64.5  I have indicated, in an imaginary and somewhat whimsical fashion, the purpose of each gene…and as you can see, 9 of the 10 genes are identical. And that’s what makes us all human beings, and not chimps, dogs, flounders, or banana trees. Where there exist more than one variety of the same gene, these different variations are called “alleles.” 9 of these 10 genes have no alleles…only the one for eye color does. But again, these alleles don’t somehow blend together to give you your eye color…instead, one of each pair of genes will be “expressed”…called the “dominant” gene…the other will have no effect, the “recessive” gene. Thus in this case, your eyes are brown…

64.6  On the far right of Chart 213, I have checked off which of each gene pair is dominant, your father’s or your mother’s. In a sample as small as this, it might be 7/3 or 10/0 instead of 5/5, but overall it averages out to 50-50. And as you can see, only 1 of these 10 gene pairs will make any physical difference in your makeup…and of course it’s not limited to physical appearance…the genes for the various blood types for example are also alleles. Assuming you have as many as 30,000 genes…altho it’s likely closer to 20,000…99.5% of them have no alleles…thus only .5% of them can make a difference between 2 individuals…that’s a mere 150 genes. This is why we say that everyone on Earth is virtually identical genetically.

64.7  Now the degree to which we are related genealogically…as opposed to genetically…is another thing entirely. It depends on receiving the same gene, whether allele or not, by descent from a common ancestor. Chart 214 shows how many direct ancestors you have going back each generation. As you can see, by the time you get to 13G grandparents, you have 32,768 of them…this is based on every person having 2 parents…in reality, all those 13G slots may not be filled by a different person…and indeed at some point they cannot be, since there couldn’t have been that many humans alive on Earth at the time.

64.8  But theoretically, since you don’t have 32,768 genes, you couldn’t have received one gene from each of your 13G grandparents…it is numerically impossible…there are too many ancestors and not enough genes. And  given 25 years per generation, this is only on average 400 years ago! In terms of the genes that make you you, the ones that have alleles and thus can differ, you cannot have received one from each of your 256 6G grandparents, since again there are only 150 such genes. This phenomenon is called “flushing”…the point at which genetic material from any one specific ancestor is for all intents and purposes no longer present in your DNA by direct descent…of course you could still have that gene, but from someone else. However there are 2 important points to bear in mind.

64.9  First, the probability of inheritance by descent of any genes at all, let alone any individual gene specifically, is never mathematically 0 for any of your ancestors. That’s  because, as we saw in the case of the Lottery Paradox, you have to get those genes from someone…for every one of your genes, one of your ancestors in every generation is going to be a “winner”…even tho the chances of any of them individually are practically nonexistent. So genetically, you have to be related to some of your ancestors, just not most of them. And secondly, you are still genealogically 100% related to every one of your ancestors, by reason of the basic parent/child link. This is a social connection that is absolute, regardless of how little you might be biologically related by descent. And remember, considered in this way, it’s thought that everyone on Earth is related by at most a distance of 50th cousins…and many of course much closer.

64.10  Thus, given any random person alive today, you have practically the same genetic profile as they do. On the other hand, the odds that both of you got any of those genes from the same person, by direct descent, are practically, but never absolutely, 0. Which is why you shouldn’t confuse genetic similarity…what we have…with genealogical kinship…where we got it, or might have. 

64.11  I might also add that the DNA tests you hear so much about these days can reveal important medical information…and certainly confirm parentage…but they can’t tell you who your ancestors are. How could they, unless we had 50 billion DNA profiles on file…one for every person who ever lived. At best, they can trace you back to, say, Hungarians who migrated to Finland at some point in the past…or indicate in what part of Africa your roots are planted, that sort of thing. In fact, in this sense, genealogy helps genetics more than genetics helps genealogy…regardless of the sales pitch you might hear.

Dear G4BB: Well, they’re at it again: “OMG! KEVIN BACON MARRIED TO HIS COUSIN!” This was recently revealed on “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” on PBS. What’s the story, morning glory? …from Ida, in Idiotsville

64.12  Yeah, and altho you’ll hear it has to do with DNA analysis, since that’s a hot topic these days, he actually does it with good old-fashioned family trees and parental pedigrees…and for famous people to boot, since theirs are more completely researched and readily available. But once again, the level of ignorance and mean-spiritedness, egged on by the lunatic Media, is rather sad. On-line commentaries use words like “creepy,” “queasy,” and “weird”…and come up with feeble quips about “degrees of separation” and “shaking up the family tree.” And yes, some of the more conscientious ones will add in “marginally” or “distant”…because sure enough, Kevin Bacon and his wife of 23 years Kyra Sedgwick are 10th cousins once removed. She’s also related to Richard Nixon and Marilyn Monroe.

64.13  But she herself was quoted as saying: “It was a little unsettling, I’m not going to lie.” Well, with all due respect to an talented actress, she’s also a moron. As you can see from the right half of Chart 214, any common genes by descent have been flushed out between 2 individuals at the stage of 7th cousins…and as for those all-important alleles that determine individual differences, they’re all but gone by 4th cousins…which is to say, in ways that matter, you’re as related to your 4th cousin as you are to a random person off the street. But then what can you expect from PBS, when the History Channel is doing shows about Nostradamus and the Mayans, for gosh sakes…

64.14  And by way of review, if somebody says they’re your Xth cousin Y times removed, this means that one of you is the Xth cousin of a direct ancestor of the other. Remember, Xth cousins share a pair of (X-1)G grandparents if they are full cousins, only one if they are half cousins. And the Y tells you how far back that ancestor is…1 for parents, 2 for grandparents, 3 for great grandparents…beyond that,  Y for (Y-2)G grandparents. So in Chart 215, I have a 50/50 chance of being right…either Kevin is 10th cousin to one of Kyra’s parents, or Kyra is to one of Kevin’s. In short, it’s possible you’re more closely related to Kevin Bacon that Kyra is, even if you aren’t an actor…I’m just sayin’…

Dear G4BB: wise/dumbGeek query alert! Eghh! Eghh! Eghh!  …from Albert Einstein III, in Bolsa Chica, CA

64.15  Thanx, Al…I’m on it! And you know, it’s gratifying to think that before I started seriously getting into this stuff, maybe a year and a half ago, I would have had to do some serious brainwork on this question…today, it comes automatically, as I hope it is starting to for some of you, dear friends…next week, more choice missives…adiós…

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…completely lacking in DNA, oddly enough…

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com

G4BB 63: No Grandparents For You!

No Grandparents For You!

63.1  Gosh, I hate to blow my own horn, but if I asked someone else to, that might be considered somewhat unsanitary. Point is, as I survey the various genealogical resources on the net, I have to conclude that G4BB goes some ways toward “taking it to the next level,” as they say today. For example, in the area of precision. Does it seem to you that sometimes I get too “picky”? Well, the correct relationship between 2 people is what it is…there are no almosts or maybes. Even when that relationship is complicated, like several things on one side of the family, several things on the other, these people are still related in exactly and precisely those ways.

63.2  And what I have specifically in mind is…the definition of numbered cousins…let’s do it with 1st cousins. As we have seen, “have a grandparent in common” is not sufficient, since that is true of you and your siblings. “Have a grandparent in common, but not a parent” looks like it might work, except that this is true of you and your half-1st cousins. “Have 2 grandparents in common, but not a parent” seems to nail it…trouble is, double half-1st cousins have 2 grandparents in common, yet they are not 1st cousins.

63.3  One obvious solution is to forget grandparents altogether when defining 1st cousins. 1st cousins are the children of siblings, and that is understood to mean full siblings…please do specify “full” if the context demands it. 2nd cousins are then children of 1st cousins…3rd cousins are the children of 2nd cousins…etc. This way, the definition of each successive degree of numbered cousin depends only on the definition before it…but the question of grandparents…how far back and how many…never comes up.

63.4   Now as a consequence of this definition, for example, 2nd cousins will have grandparents who are siblings…full siblings…and those sibling grandparents will share a common father and mother…these being the common great grandparents of the 2nd cousins. It all follows automatically from the simple stipulation that (X+1)th cousins are the children of Xth cousins. In effect, we are defining numbered cousins “bottom up” as opposed to “top down.” And this makes perfect sense, since “top down” can mean different alternate paths down to the cousins, and complications can arise. Start with the numbered cousins at the bottom and work your way up, and all the relationships fall neatly into place, as shown in Chart 209.

63.5  But suppose your grandparents are lovely people, and you hate to exclude them unilaterally. Instead of relating numbered cousins back to a common ancestor, you can instead go back to some degree of grandparents who were siblings…and again, we are assuming full siblings. Thus for example, in Chart 209, 2nd cousins would be defined as having grandparents who are siblings…and again, the rest of the relationships, up and down the tree, fall into line. In short, defining numbered cousins in terms of common ancestors is imprecise at best, and can lead to the wrong conclusions…I strongly recommend against it. And it’s my blog, nez pah? …even tho…to save time, sometimes I will do it myself…sue me…

63.6   Anyway, I pointed out this discrepancy…how sharing 2 grandparents doesn’t guarantee being 1st cousins…at the Genealogy.com general discussion forum, but so far have provoked no reaction…well, jeepers, it was Easter week, everybody’s busy. Now here are 4 ways you could have 2 common grandparents but not be 1st cousins…

63.7   But of course Chart 210  assumes X and Y’s parents are a pair of brothers and a pair of sisters…they could be 2 pairs of “one-of-each,” in which case there are 4 more possibilities, right? Wrong…actually there are only 3 more, since the parents being mixed pairs, and the shared grandparents also being a mixed pair, results in only 1 case, not 2.

63.8   To summarize:

case 1….X & Y share grandfather thru fathers, grandfather thru mothers
case 2….X & Y share grandfather thru fathers, grandmother thru mothers
case 3….X & Y share grandmother thru fathers, grandfather thru mothers
case 4…..X & Y share grandmother thru fathers, grandmother thru mothers
case 5….X & Y share 2 grandfathers thru their fathers/mothers
case 6….X & Y share 2 grandmothers thru their fathers/mothers
case 7….X & Y share a grandmother and a grandfather thru their fathers/mothers

As far as individuals are concerned, case 7 is different from X’s point of view than from Y’s…but genealogically, their positions are interchangeable…so its just one self same arrangement.

‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡

Dear G4BB…Is it my imagination, or is the Media really hurting for scandals…the latest is Whitney Houston’s daughter apparently dating her “god-brother”…that sounds like a stretch, considering I’ve  never heard of such a thing…any thoughts?  …from Gomer, in Goobertown

63.9  I’m with you. In the old days, a child out of wedlock…the euphemistically cheerful “love child”…was enough to cause quite a splash…today, it’s practically routine among celebrities, not to mention everyone else. So yeah, they have to really scramble to come up with the Next Big Horrible Thing. We saw that last week with Jerry Lee Lewis and wife #7. And in the context of Forbidden Love, god-siblings haven’t existed for 500 years…but here’s the story…

63.10  The idea behind godparents…which is to say, baptismal sponsors…was originally to ensure the child would be raised in the Catholic faith, should anything happen to its natural parents. Strictly speaking, this tradition persists to the present day. By way of solemnizing the relationship, canon law originally forbid godparents and godchildren to marry…but over the centuries, this restriction spread to other members of both families…so if Joe Blow was your sister’s godfather, you couldn’t marry Joe Blow’s daughter, that sort of thing. And it got to the point where this was causing a problem with people finding mates.

63.11  After all, besides the religious component, there was also an important social one…a way of linking families not otherwise related by blood or marriage, and thus strengthening community ties. But by the 16th century, these 2 aspects were operating at cross purposes…the family from which you’d want to pick a godparent was also the family you’d want as in-laws. Accordingly, at the Council of Trent, 1545-1563, these restrictions were cut back to just the parents, godparents, and godchildren. Hence your godmother’s son, your god-brother as it were, was no longer off limits.

63.12  In the Catholic Church today, there is no restriction in this regard at all. And indeed, it sometimes happens that a godparent marries a godchild, altho it’s not what you think. Say Catholic Clara is marrying non-Catholic Ned. Before the wedding, Ned converts and is baptized…his sponsor is his fiancee Clara…so technically he will be marrying his godmother, but today there’s nothing against that. Other Christian denominations have other rules and customs, and we’ll get to that in a moment…

63.13  Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown is the only child of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. Nicholas “Nick” Gordon came to live with them in Atlanta 10 years ago, when he was 12 and Bobbi Kris was 9. I can’t find the complete story, but “his parents abandoned him” or “his father went to jail and his mother couldn’t feed him,” that’s the gist of it…apparently he was originally just a friend of Bobbi Kris. He was never formally adopted by Whitney, and his parents are still alive. The Media simply doesn’t know how to describe this relationship, so you will see “god-brother,” “foster brother,” and incorrectly “adopted brother.”

63.14  It is true that he has been quoted as saying Whitney called him her “god-son”…but for the record, they are Baptists, and the Baptist Church has no such thing as godparenting or baptismal sponsors. There is an informal infant dedication custom, which typically calls for a godparent…this could entail a ceremony, or something as simple as asking if they will be  and their accepting. Thus CeCe Winans is Bobbi Kris’ godmother, and Darlene Love was Whitney’s. The common misconception that Aretha Franklin was Whitney’s godmother was corrected by Aretha herself in an interview with Al Roker on the Today Show in February of this year. She said she was just an “honorary aunt,” and Whitney called her “Aunt Ree.”

63.15  Legally, a godparent and godchild…let alone their other family members…have no relationship at all, and thus marriage laws do not apply. Bobbi Kristina and Nick are not related by blood, and other relatives can say what they will about the “i-word”…as far as I’m concerned, that’s where the matter stands…another case of MYOB…for them and for us. Come back next week for more mailbaggage…

Wicked Ballsy

A while back, I noticed this comic strip and wondered if Alex got it right…since it’s so common these says to mistakenly call a step-relative a half-. It hinged on whether Jeff was Joanie’s natural son or step-son…turns out it’s natural…Alex’ mother and Jeff are half-siblings…so Alex is 100% correct…and as graduates of MIT, both me and her, I’d expect nothing less… 😉 😉

But talk about You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby…when Joanie Caucus debuted in the strip on 9/10/1972, she was running away from her husband (never seen, hence no picture)…

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless foster plugs…will you give them a home?…

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com

DFHC Easter 2012…Son of PEEPSapalooza!

Son of PEEPSapalooza!

item 1 >>>  Dear Peeps People: Last year at this time I presented a history of Peeps and their many colors…you can find it here: PEEPSapalooza. At that time, I had hoped by this time to have more of the story…and  I do, altho we’re not all the way to PEEPStopia just yet. But to start with, here’s a review of the rainbow of Peeps hues…

item 2 >>>  Pretty in PEEPS…The Just Born Company considers their color assortment to consist of 6: blue, green, lavender ( = purple), orange, pink, and yellow. These are “regular” PEEPS…”dipped” PEEPS have a coating of milk or dark chocolate on the base, are flavored “chocolate mousse,” and are colored brown, giving you 7 total colors if you want to include them. As you can see, there are 2 PEEPS colors no longer made: red PEEPS were available only at Target stores, from 2006-2009, give or take. And as I mentioned last year, the last clipping I have advertising white PEEPS, one of the original colors dating back to the 1950s, is 2001…internet evidence suggests they were last made in 2007 or 2008…perhaps by next Easter we’ll have it pinned down!

item 3 >>>  Sorry, No Chocolates For You…I have never bought the chocolate-covered PEEPS, and wouldn’t have counted them as an official PEEPS color. Good thing too, because it turns out they really aren’t PEEPS after all! In the top row below, you see what any reasonable person would consider chocolate-covered PEEPS…but these are not made by Just Born…they are an “after-market” product from a company called Fantasy Candies. Can you buy a food product, modify it, and sell it as your own? Apparently so, cuz they’re doing it. But in the bottom row, you see that Just Born’s chocolate-covereds aren’t PEEPS at all…they are 2-dimensional if you will, they lay flat, and you can see that clearly as one is split open on the right.

item 4 >>>  What Can Brown do for PEEPS?… Now in the spectrum of PEEPS colors above, I showed what was in the stores this year for Easter. Last Christmas they had another brown dipped PEEPS variety, this time caramel flavored. Short of actually seeing them sitting in front of me, I wouldn’t care to guess whether they are the same shade of brown as the Easter chocolate mousse browns. The illustration on the Christmas package seems to imply they are lighter, and notice that between the Christmas and the Easter packages, the blue and yellow logos appear identically colored, so who knows?

item 5 >>>  How Red Were My PEEPS…Similarly, this past Valentines Day, strawberry creme flavored dipped PEEPS were in all the stores…whether the same color as the discontinued Target PEEPS, I cannot say.

item 6 >>> And finally…As to the “Original Marshmallow Chicks,” the Chickies made by the Tell Chocolate Corporation of Brooklyn…the kind I remember as a kid. Since last year, several websites have popped up extolling the virtues of this other brand, last made, as far as I can tell, in 2004. Most posters seem to agree that Chickies were much better, and PEEPS considered an inferior knock-off. One lady was even able to contact the family-run Tell company in 2009, and received the following reply…

At any event, here’s an article that ran in the New York Daily News, April 21, 2000…..sadly, no pictures…but squirrels?…

Wicked Ballsy

You always have options…in this case “Spring Marshmallow Birds” by a candy company called the Have It Sweet…all 6 colors plus white.

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…going peep peep peep all the way home…

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com

G4BB 62: Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.

Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.

…or, The Killer Takes a Wife

62.1  Jerry Lee Lewis Marries Another Cousin! screamed the recent headlines.  It happened on March 9, and and out trotted the predictable redneck “i-word” jokes…Meet my biological father-in-law, etc.  Except it simply isn’t true. It wasn’t true the first time, and it isn’t true this time. Let’s see what is true…

62.2  Jerry Lee Lewis was born in Ferriday, Concordia Parish, in southern Louisiana, along the border with the state of Mississippi, that border of course being the Mississippi River. His father Elmo (some census records say “Elmore”) was the 10th of 11 siblings, 7 sisters and 4 brothers. According to him, the “Lee” came from Jerry Lee’s grandfather Leroy Lewis, called “Lee” by the family…altho Jerry’s mother Mamie claimed it was in honor of her sister Stella’s husband Lee Calhoun. As you can see in Chart 207, Elmo’s sister Jane named a Henry Brown, and one of their sons was J.W., called “Jay.” As far as I can tell, this was his legal name…the initials didn’t stand for anything.

62.3  J.W. played the bass, and migrated to Memphis, where he formed a band, along with his brother Otis, a fiddler. Eventually, 1st cousin Jerry Lee Lewis joined up on piano, and soon he was fronting the band and on his way to superstardom. At age 23, Jerry Lee married J.W.’s daughter Myra Gale in December of 1957…she had turned 13 that July. It was his third marriage…um, her first. A scandal ensued, based on both age and kinship, derailing his career for a good decade.

62.4  So to address those 2 issues…you will see their relationship variously described as cousin, 1st cousin, 2nd cousin, or even, incredibly, 3rd cousin…with or without any number of removeds. As Chart 207 plainly shows, J.W. and Jerry Lee were 1st cousins, making Myra Gale his 1st cousin once removed. Their Coefficient of Relationship is 1/16, which is to say they did not share 15/16ths of their genes. This is the same as half-1st cousins (the children of half-siblings), or halfway between 1st and 2nd cousins. It was, then as now, completely legal…roughly half the states today allow 1st cousin marriages, and even those that do not…do allow anything beyond 1st cousins…with the interesting exception of North Carolina, which excludes double 1st-cousins, since genetically they are the equivalent of half-siblings.

62.5  Truth be told, bride and groom were slightly more closely related than 1C1R, owing to Leroy and Arilla Lewis…grandparents of Jerry Lee and J.W. …themselves being 1st cousins. And given the way families intertwined in that neck of the woods, other connections further back should hardly surprise you.

62.6  Now anyone doing genealogical research will find many examples of 1st cousin marriages all across North America. Today, Louisiana is not one of the states that allows it, but the history of state marriage laws is notoriously difficult to ascertain…and as I’ve said many times, writing a blog for free is different than writing a book for money. Where no laws were in place, holdovers from British Common Law prevailed, and that allowed 1st cousins to marry. And even if laws against it existed, lax enforcement depending on the locale isn’t that far-fetched. It has been reported that the marriage license asked “Relation to Bride” and Jerry put down “none,” which I take to mean, without a shred of facetiousness on my part, “not my sister or my 1st cousin.”

62.7  As to the question of the bride’s age, for most of human history, girls married and bore children soon after the onset of puberty. That is pure fact. Western Common Law allowed marriage, with the parents’ permission, of girls at age 12 and boys at age 14. Grandma Arilla was 15 when she married Grandpa Lee…Jerry Lee’s mother Mamie was 16…his sister Frankie Jean was married and widowed at 12, and sister Linda Gail first married at 14. This was commonplace where they grew up, and Jerry Lee was frankly astonished at the public’s reaction. True, it didn’t help that they lied to the press and said she was 15…it also didn’t help that Myra Gale was quoted as saying “back home a girl can marry at 10 if she can find a husband”…and it certainly didn’t help that they also lied about the date of the wedding, since his divorce from wife #2 hadn’t yet been finalized when they tied the knot…nor that they told her parents after they were married, instead of before, which would have been the strictly kosher way to go about it.

62.8  Still and all, the fact remains that there were no legal ramifications…not to Jerry Lee and Myra Gale’s union, despite the outcry…nor for that matter to any of their many relatives and neighbors in similar connubial circumstances…and the couple remained married for 13 years and had 2 children. And it’s interesting that Elvis Presley’s popularity withstood his falling in love with a 14-year-old…so perhaps it was the misinterpreted blood relation after all that was the real bone of contention.

62.9  As to Jerry Lee Lewis’ recent marriage to the ex-wife of Myra Gale’s younger brother Rusty Brown, I’d say it’s none of anybody’s business. They are not blood relatives, period. He’s 76 and she’s 62, and his caretaker, and according to the bride’s sister, they are in love and extremely happy…heck, it should happen to any of us, right? The fact that Rusty Brown and his father J.W. recently published a book of remembrances of their famous relative suggests it’s one big happy clan, and we all ought to just politely butt out.

62.10  But while we’re on the subject of in-laws, a little history is in order. It will seem strange to us that over the last millennium, codified laws have generally allowed 1st cousins to marry, but not siblings-in-law. Indeed, in England it was not until the 1st half of the 20th century that in-laws could legally wed, altho this was, as it often is, a case of the law catching up with the prevailing social practice.  (see 55.6-55.7) To understand why this is so, one must accept the fact that our ancestors’ ways were not always our ways…and understand the distinction between unilineal and bilineal systems of kinship.

62.11 In Western society today, you consider yourself part of 2 families…your father’s and your mother’s…you have 4 grandparents…and uncles, aunts, and cousins on “both sides.” This is bilineal…2 lines of descent. But this way of thinking has evolved from an older form of kinship reckoning…unilineal or 1 line of descent…where you literally belonged to your father’s family or your mother’s, but not both. It’s a simple thing to state, but as we saw in the case of Beowulf and his matrilineal kin back in G4BB 59: Dygging Ye Olde Rootes, it has some startling implications: for example, a man’s social bonds being stronger to his sister’s children than even to his own children.

62.12  And as we saw, in the days of the first Anglo-Saxons the matrilineal system was changing to a patrilineal one. Thus, when a woman married, she literally became a member of her husband’s family. This is why she took his surname, not because she was “owned” by her husband. The “wife as property” myth has relatively recently been propagated by a school of thought I will not specify here, but it begins with an “f.” In fact, across Europe, laws and customs varied greatly, and in many cases women could own property and had rights of inheritance.

62.13  The point is, “joining your husband’s family” meant something more than we might imagine today. If a man’s wife died, he could not marry her sister, simply because she was his sister too…not by blood, but by law. In fact, that’s what “sister-in-law” meant…sister by law…or sister in the eyes of the law. Obviously, things have changed considerably from olden times till now. Even so, the notion that “in-laws mean incest” has lingered…at least when it comes to “hillbilly” jokes…a sad testament to the ignorance and mean-spiritedness of some people these days.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

62.14  Next month a book by J.D. Davis will be published entitled “Unconquered – The Saga of Cousins Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart, and Mickey Gilley.” Yes, the three are “cousins” in the broadest sense…no, they are not 1st cousins, each to the others…as we will sort out with Chart 208.

62.15  The key players here are Elmo Lewis and his older sisters Irene and Ada. Their offspring…Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley, and Willie Leon “Son” Swaggart respectively…are indeed 1st cousins. Jimmy Swaggart is the son of Son, thus 1st cousin once removed to Jerry Lee and Mickey. It should be noted that all 3 were born within a year of each other…Jimmy March 15, 1935 and Jerry Lee Sept. 29, 1935, both in Ferriday, Louisiana…and Mickey on March 9, 1936, across the river in Natchez, Mississippi. Thus, Son Swaggart was considerably older than these 2 of his many 1st cousins, and growing up they called him “Uncle Son”…calling to mind “Uncle Junior” from the TV series The Sopranos…and the 1st episode of Danny Thomas’ Make Room For Daddy, which was titled “Uncle Daddy.”

62.16  And that’s where it might stand…as I said, the trio are “cousins” in the casual sense…as indeed, J.W. Brown and Rusty Brown are sometimes called the “cousins” of Jerry Lee, altho they are father and son.* Except for the fact that, as indicated by the red lines in Chart 208, Jerry Lee and Jimmy’s mothers are sisters…hence they are 1st cousins on the Herron side, while all three are related as either 1st cousins or 1C1R on the Lewis side. I honestly wish I had time to research this interesting family tree further…I know for a fact that a total of 4 Gilley brothers married 4 Lewis sisters, and it may have gone the other way too, sibling-wise…but that’s on the old bucket list, I’m afraid. Mailbag time next week…Happy Easter, cousin!

*That is how it’s commonly done, after all. Recall on The Andy Griffith Show, Aunt Bee calls both Andy and his son Opie her “nephews,” altho not of course to the extent that she ever introduced them as “My nephew Andy, and my other nephew Opie”… 😉 😉

Not Wicked Ballsy, But  Stoopid

For the life of me, I don’t understand why web-pages like the above exist. Maybe it’s the internet equivalent of people “liking to hear themselves talk”…like when a question is asked on some forum, and half a dozen helpful nudniks reply: “I have no idea.” Perhaps we should take the spirit of such as the above to be “we’re gonna get around to filling this out at some point”…or am I being overly charitable? Anyway, it gave me a chuckle, albeit a weary one.

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…on both sides, doncha know…

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com

G4BB 61: Mail Delivered on Sunday…Wow!

Mail Delivered on Sunday…Wow!

61.1  Dear Friends: How did you make out with last week’s challenge? As shown below, we took the tree of the 4 half-sisters whose fathers were 2 brothers, their half-brother, and their 1st cousin..and asked how these half-sisterly relationships would be changed if Ms. C were in fact the mother of 2 of fathers instead of just one…as represented by the green line added between Ms. C and Mr. D.

61.2  Soooooo…since Ms. C isn’t related to either Anne or Beth, the change effects only Cass and Deb. They are still half-sisters (CR = 1/4) on their mothers’ side and still 2nd cousins (CR = 1/32)  on their fathers’ side, since Mr. C and Mr. D are 1st cousins. But Cass and Deb are now doubly related on their fathers’ side, since Mr. C and Mr. D are now also half-siblings, so Cass and Deb are also half-1st cousins (CR = 1/16.) Total CR = 11/32, up from 9/32.

61.3  But recall, the question as stated allowed a second interpretation…that Mr. D was 1st cousin to Messrs. A & B not their their fathers…Big Bro and Li’l Bro…but thru Mr. D’s father Li’l Bro being a sibling of Messrs. A & B’s mother Ms. AB. Again, since Ms. C is unrelated to the “AB” side of the family, this change effects only Cass and Deb. They are still half-sisters on their mothers’ side (CR  = 1/4)…but now, instead of having no relationship thru their fathers, they are half-1st cousins ( CR = 1/16) owing to their fathers being half-brothers thru Ms. C. Total CR = 5/16, up from 4/16 or 1/4.

Dear G4BB: Are all 1st cousins related to their own 1st cousins to the same degree? …from Pilar, in Paducah 

61.4  Dear Pilar: A subtle yet interesting question. The mere fact that you asked it shows you have your doubts, and rightly so. The simple answer, by definition, is yes: all 1st cousins have a Coefficient of Relationship of 1/8…on average, they share 1/8th of their genes. Thus they are a quarter as closely related as full siblings, half as close as half-siblings. But in practice, a pair of 1st cousins may be related in other ways besides 1st cousins…say 1st cousins on their fathers’ side, 2nd cousins on their mothers’ side, so their CR is higher. This is what’s called “irregular double cousins.” If they were “regular double cousins,” they’d have the same relationship on both sides of the family…in the case of 1st cousins, if their fathers are brothers and their mothers are sisters, they are “double 1st cousins,” with a CR equivalent to half-siblings…1/8 + 1/8 = 1/4.

61.2   But what I suspect is eating at you is that the basic definition of 1st cousins is a little loose…2 people who have a common grandparent but not a common parent. By the letter of this definition, “half 1st cousins” would be considered “1st cousins,” as contrasted with “full 1st cousins.” And indeed, your full 1st cousin can be thought of as your half-1st cousin on both sides… 1/16 + 1/16 = 1/8…just as a full sibling can be considered a half-sibling on both sides…1/4 + 1/4 = ½.

61.3  Remember, full 1st cousins have parents who are full siblings…half-1st cousins have parents who are half-siblings…thus, thru that common parent, half-siblings will share only 1 grandparent, not the normal 2.  It matters  because half-cousins are only half as closely related as  full cousins. The standard definition for “numbered” cousins…1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc…establishes how many generations back you need to count. But the key to full 1st cousins is their parents have the same parents…that is, the cousins have the same 2 grandparents on the side they’re related.  Contrast this with double half-1st cousins, who also share 2 grandparents (A and B), but not thru the same parents, as shown in Chart 204. Double half-1st cousins are as closely related as full 1st cousins, but thru 2 different lines of descent, as you can see.

Dear G4BB: You have talked about 2 different kinds of kinship diagrams…what you call “family trees” with descending “branches,” what people would more or less view as traditional or standard. And what you call “parental trees” where the only connections are between parents and children…altho sometimes you mix (I’ll refrain from being trendy and using the word “hybridize”) the 2 kinds…true?   …from Scotty in Scottsboro

61.4  Dear Scotty: True. Busted. Altho you must have gathered that the overriding consideration is to make the diagrams easy to follow and understand. But you’re also right to use the word “traditional”…when a man and a woman wed, had children, and the children wed and had their own children, the downward branching illustrated these relationships perfectly…hence even the use of the word “tree.” In such a traditional setup, single lines connecting 2 individuals indicate parent and child…double lines between 2 individuals indicate a marriage, or at least a biological union, altho in the old days that was presumed to be matrimony. Single lines connect those double lines to the offspring. Sometimes an “X” is used instead of the double lines, but the double lines come in handy if the 2 individuals are situated far apart on the diagram.

61.5  But you’re right about my mixing the 2 styles…and for an example of that, we need look no further than Chart 204 above. Look on the left side of Chart 205, the 1st cousins diagram. I have redrawn it below, sticking to the letter of the law, that is, every parent is connected to every offspring. More complicated than the original? Only slightly so…my original thought was to remove as much clutter as possible.

61.6  Similarly, on the right with double half-1st cousins, I originally connected A to his 2 sons with branching lines instead of straight ones…here it’s a matter of compactness. Otherwise, the bottom part of the diagram would have had to have been spread out so as to bring A’s position in closer. Really, it’s all a matter of style and personal preference…but again, with the goal of being as clear and concise as possible.

61.7  But what makes parental trees useful is the fact that there is only one kind of connecting line, that between parent and child. The 2 parents involved are not connected by a double line or in any other way. For example with Chart 199 from last week, how would you connect the common mother of the 4 half-sisters with the 4 fathers? It would be messy to say the least, as you can see in the lower diagram of Chart 206. The fact that Messrs. A, B, C, and D cannot be on the same horizontal line causes confusion…add to that, connecting the grandparents’ generation…Ms. AB, Big Bro, and Ms. C…to their sons would mean crossing double lines, making the whole thing a hopeless jumble…so much so that I don’t have the heart to do it…I can see it in my mind, and that’s enough…you can do it as an exercise, if you must.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

On a personal note…in terms of site views, last week marked the busiest week and the single busiest day since I started this blog in September of 2010. And March 2012 has been the busiest month ever, with 5 times as many hits as March 2011. And this despite the time constraints that have forced me to cut back to just once a week, the genealogy blog. Well, when I was unemployed (“pseudo-retired”), this WAS my job 😉 ;)…so a heartfelt thanks to you from this thick-fingered geezer…and see you next week with more familial entanglements!

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…plenty to see here, folks!

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podbean.com  and   http://thewholething.podbean.com

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podbean.com