> I'm a little confused about cousins - once removed, twice removed. > What does that mean? > > I have found cousins that are related down the line to my gggf. Are > they cousins or are they removed cousins? > > emmydbd The Wikipedia article on cousins has a good treatment of the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin and if you do a web search for something like 'cousin chart' or 'cousin calculator', you should come up with a number of ways to figure it out. The short explanation, though, is: -- (# of generations to common ancestors - 1) = 'degree' of cousinship That assumes that you and your have the same number of generations between you and the common ancestor. If not: -- Absolute value of((# of generations from you to common ancestor) - (# of generations from your cousin to the common ancestor)) = degrees of 'removal'. So... Simple example. My father's sister's daughter and I are first cousins. Our common ancestors are our grandparents, so there are two generations to the common ancestors. Her son and I are first cousins once removed, since the common ancestors are still my grandparents, who are his great-grandparents. So the removal is 1: ABS(2 - 3) Most genealogy software has built-in relationship calculators. -- Joe Makowiec http://makowiec.org/ Email: http://makowiec.org/contact/?Joe Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org/ Joe Makowiec <makowiec@invalid.invalid>