"David Kearney" <kearneyd@erols.com> wrote: >Speakers/writers also sometimes use "cousin" to refer to non-blood relatives, <snip>, although I don't know how often such usage might be found in documents dating to the colonial period in our geographic area of interest. > All too often. When a party is named "cousin" in a will (e.g.), it is not so much a concrete identifier as the introductory red flag to a puzzle for the reader to unravel. It may mean blood (including nephews and nieces), it may mean in-law (including in-law of in-law), and sometimes it seems to have been happily applied to some blood brother, long-standing drinking buddy or such. Now, it may be that the use can always be pegged to (actually based in) some familial relationship, but I do know that some of the instances found have no solution in determinable kinship based on surviving records. Another vague hand-waving term in the records is "kinsman", which at least has the nice feature of self-referential fuzziness, not herding the reader to leap at a specific assumption. John