>>In my research I also found some large Coughlin families (Irish Catholic) and Shane families (Irish Protestant).
>>I guess it all works out. As for myself, I have 17 aunts and uncles all now deceased and about 50 first cousins (2 married to Buddhist).
>
>I've found some vague references to cousinectomies being frequently unsuccessful. Many times I heard someone say "I had a cousin twice removed", so I concluded the first removal failed.

I have always thought that once removed cousins were your first cousin's children (same great grandparents) and twice removed were you first cousin's grandchildren(same great great grandparents). You really need a scorecard to keep up in my family. I have 1st cousins(mother's side) married to 1st cousins(father's side), I also have cousins that are double 1st cousins( parents were brothers that married sisters) and 2 female double first cousins that also married brothers. And I have a great aunt by marriage whose great grand nephew is married to one of my twice removed cousins.

From the Republican Chronicle of Ithaca, New York on April 24, 1822 and that was copied from the London Literary Gazette:
A proof that a man may be his own Grandfather.—There was a widow and her daughter-in-law, and a man and his son. The widow married the son, and the daughter the old man; the widow was, therefore, mother to her husband's father, consequently grandmother to her own husband. They had a son, to whom she was great-grandmother; now, as the son of a great-grandmother must be either a grandfather or great-uncle, this boy was therefore his own grandfather. N. B. This was actually the case with a boy at a school in Norwich.[3]