Do you know your cousins? Not the cousins you grew up with, but the many cousins you are going to encounter in your genealogical research? Once you get far enough into your genealogy research, you will be faced with a list of cousins of varying degrees of closeness to you. Making sense of just how close those cousins are to you is key to understanding your family tree as a whole, as well as where those cousins fall on it.
Knowing your exact cousin relationship can also help you verify DNA matches if you do DNA testing.
You will probably hear the term “removed,” as well as a variety of numbers in association with cousin relationships when reading about genealogy. These relationships are significant to your research. Your first cousin three times removed, your second cousin one time removed, your third cousin four times removed and more are all
meaningful relationships. But what do they mean, and how do you figure out just how you are connected to a particular cousin?
It’s easy!
