But the average person no longer knows this. Parents don't teach it and neither do schools. Most simply think they are a cousin of some sort, but not exactly what! :o)


>>>>Sorry about that - I was referring to the expression "cousin twice removed", which always sounded so surgical to me.
>>>
>>>But you do know that "Cousin twice removed" doesn't refer to "cousin's cousin"...
>>
>>I've never had any idea how to work out the stage of removal, or who comes under that category anyway. It's a bit like trying to dry-run the processing of a 4-D array in your head :-)
>
>Steve's explanation elsewhere is good. Here's the high-level.
>
>The first part ("nth cousin") indicates how many generations since the common relative (or more accurately, the siblings). So first cousins have siblings for parents, second cousins have siblings for grandparents and so on.
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>The second part indicates how many generations between the two people in question. "Once removed" indicates they're one generation apart in the family, and so forth.
>
>There is some ambiguity here, since once you're talking about different generations, you need to know where to start counting for the siblings, but the answer is always with the one in the earlier generation. That is, my first cousin's child is my first cousin, once removed, not my second cousin, once removed. Since I'm the earlier generation, we count back from me, looking for the siblings.
>
>Tamar