It's easy to figure out the degree of "cousin-ness" if you just remember to count the g's in the nearest common ancestor. That is, if the common ancestor is the grandparents, two people are first cousins; great-grandparents - the two are second cousins, and so on. In the case of two people with a different number of g's to a common ancestor, e.g., myself and my brother's son, we are first cousins once removed, since my grandparents (one g) are his great-grandparents (two g's). I had to sort this out when I found that my mothers parents were double first cousins. And doesn't that look strange on a family tree? Their names were Lincoln Thornton and Alice Lewis, born in Ankeny, IA, and settled in Artesia, CA.