#211: Elizabeth and Philip

211.1  After the death of Prince Philip, I re-read my post from ten years ago, Related How Again #16: Royal Action! (here) I corrected a couple of typos, made a few minor edits, and re-checked the math, just to be on the safe side. It has proven to be one of my most popular posts, quoted as a source on several other websites…one even “borrows” my charts, but then that’s the way of the net, no? 

211.2  In it I cover 5 ways that Elizabeth II and Philip are blood relatives…3 through Queen Victoria, one through Christian IX of Denmark, and one through neither. I opined that there were likely more ways going further back, and I was right. In this post we’ll check 6 more ways: 2 through Christian, one through his wife Louise of Hesse-Kassel, and 3 through both of them, as they were related to each other in several ways. Christian and Louise were mostly German, although both were also great great grandchildren of George II, and in fact Christian was in 2 ways, as 2 of his grandparents were 1st cousins.  

211.3  But to review the first 5 ways…. 

211.4  3rd cousins…since both Elizabeth and Philip are great great grandchildren of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. And as such, Philip was himself in the line of succession, albeit way down. The last time a complete list was compiled was 10 years ago, and he was around #550.

211.5  2nd cousins once removed…since Philip and Elizabeth’s father were the great grandchildren of Christian IX and Louise. So this is actually their closest relationship, but the one that’s alway quoted is 3rd cousins, since that line is more significant: it’s the British royal line, and it’s the reason Elizabeth sits on the throne today. Together, these 2 relationships amount to about three quarters of their total coefficient of relationship. 

211.6  double 5th cousins…since Victoria and Albert were themselves 1st cousins.

211.7  4th cousins…since both Elizabeth and Philip were great great great grandchildren of Ludwig Von Wurtenberg. 

211.8  4th cousins once removed…since Elizabeth and Philip’s mother were great great great grandchildren of George III. All together, these 5 ways amount to a coefficient of relationship of 2.75%. The remaining 6 ways add just .33%.

211.9  And of those 6, none are through Victoria. Now you might be surprised to learn that Elizabeth’s pedigree (direct ancestors, meaning parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc) is only completely known through 5 generations, counting her parents as the first generation. (I say that because one popular system would count Elizabeth herself as generation 1, and her parents then as generation 2.) There are 10 unknowns in the 6th generation, that is, nobody knows the parents of 5 of her great great great grandparents (that’s 5 out of 32.) Mind you, these unknowns are NOT on the royal side.

211.10  At any event, I believe these 11 relationships are all there are going back through 8 generations, barring the unknowns, which of course tend to add up. You’ll notice on the left of Chart 761 that I have not filled in any names, as I normally would. I just felt like working with a more streamlined tree this time. I know the names, and if you need to know, send me a comment. I have marked Elizabeth and Philip as E and P…Christian is C…and at the top is G,  who is George II, the grandfather of George III, monarch during the American Revolution, to give you a chronological context. And the green line near the top is of no significance, just colored differently since it crosses a black line.    

211.11  So how do you evaluate a tangle like this? Here’s a “shocking trick,” as internet click-bait ads like to put it. If you and I shared a common great grandparent, how are we related? Well, we could be siblings, half-siblings, 1st cousins, half-1st cousins, 2nd cousins, or half-2nd cousins. Sharing a great grandparent doesn’t tell you anything specific. But what if one of my grandparents and one of your grandparents were siblings? Then we could only be 2nd cousins and nothing else. So the answer is, look for siblings and work your way down from there. And as we see on the right of Chart 761, there are 5 sets of siblings to consider, one set of which are half-siblings (the dark green).    

211.12  You’ll notice in Chart 762 that 2 of those sibling pairs and the half-sibling pair lead down to Louise on one side and Christian IX on the other side, and they were married. That means that their descendants have a double relationship to each other. Why is that?

211.13  Well, the top tree in Chart 763 is what it would look like if Louise and Christian were not married. They are 3rd cousins, being the great great grandchildren of George II, and their descendants follow down the “cousin line”…their offspring are 4th cousins, their grandchildren are 5th cousins, etc.

211.14  But the bottom 2 trees in Chart 763 show them married, and so the cousin lines of each can go in one of 2 different directions. For example, if they have sons A and B, these sons are related according to how A’s father is related to B’s mother, and how A’s mother is related to B’s father. These relationships are represented by 4 different sets of inherited genes, and must be compared 2 by 2. Thus the cousin line relationships are doubled.

211.15  In Chart 764 there are three more ways Elizabeth and Philip are related, but these do not depend on Louise and Christian being married…the lines of descent in each case go through either Louise or Christian, but not both, and so the relationships between the descendants are single not double.  

211.16  Totaling up all 11 relationships, Elizabeth and Philip are related by 3.08%. 2nd cousins are related by 3.125%, so they are a bit more distant that 2nd cousins. Half-2nd cousins are 1.56% and 3rd cousins are .78%, so saying that they are the equivalent of 2nd cousins is a very close approximation and thus a reasonable simplification, bearing in mind that they are not literally 2nd cousins. You have to be 2nd cousins to be 2nd cousins, math or no math…

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211.17  This just in….as we were about to “go to press,” I discovered that Victoria and Albert, besides being 1st cousins, were also 3rd cousins once removed. Victoria’s mother was the sister of Albert’s father Ernst, and Ernst was his wife’s 2nd cousin once removed, as a pair of his great grandparents were also her mother’s great grandparents. Trust me, it checks…and through this relationship Elizabeth and Philip were double 7th cousins once removed, adding another .003% to their total degree of kinship. As you might expect, the article I read said Victoria and Albert were related in other ways further back. These weren’t specified…and will for now remain a project for another day.

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Copyright © 2021 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

#210: Old Pap’s Puzzle Pouch

One of my hobbies is writing very short Sherlock Holmes stories…not with crimes or murders but solving puzzles…classic logic & math puzzles, kinship puzzles, chess puzzles (although not of the standard kind), just anything that strikes my fancy. There are parts of the following story I am not happy with and will be changing…so this version will be soon gone forever. Not all of it has to do with kinship, but some does…

~~~~~~~~~

A mild November had given way to a frosty December. Sherlock Holmes and I had finished our breakfast and were seated by the fire.

“I expect a client within the hour. Time enough for an after-breakfast smoke,” he said, and began blowing acrid yellow rings across the room. I opened the Clarion-Monitor to the next-to-the-last page for the Old Pap’s Puzzle Pouch column.

After a time, Holmes remarked “What says the old troublemaker this week, Watson? You appear vexed.” 

“Oh, it’s just that this first riddle reminds me of one from last week that had me in fits. I thought I had the solution, but when I reviewed it in my mind, I got a second answer. I tried yet again, and got my first answer, and back and forth between the two.”

“I surely agree that a properly constructed puzzle ought to have a single answer. In fact, among puzzle composers there is a word for a puzzle that has an unintended second solution: it has been ‘cooked.’ What was this duplicitous offering?”

“As I recall, it went like this: On what day could you truly say: If yesterday were tomorrow, today would be Friday.”

“Ha! Ha!” cried Holmes, slapping his knee. “It is as I suspected: the question is an ambiguous one. It can be understood in two different ways, yielding conflicting results. Do you remember your answers?”

“As a matter of fact I do not.”

“No matter, we can work it through. Now the presence of the word if tells us we are entertaining an imaginary world, but one which takes its conditions from the real world. So we rephrase the riddle in this manner: If yesterday in the imaginary world is tomorrow in the real world, then today in the imaginary world is Friday.  If the imaginary today is Friday, the imaginary yesterday is Thursday, and the real tomorrow is also Thursday. And if the real tomorrow is Thursday, the real today is Wednesday. Sound familiar?”

“Now that you say it, it does.”

“Good. But we may also state the puzzle this way: If yesterday in the real world is tomorrow in the imaginary world, then today in the imaginary world is Friday. Now if the imaginary today is Friday, the imaginary tomorrow is Saturday, and the real yesterday is also Saturday. And if the real yesterday is Saturday, the real today is Sunday. I’ll warrant that was your second solution.”

“I believe so, but which solution is the correct one?”

“They are both correct. You see, Watson, your approach was very conscientious in that you attempted to verify your answer, and in doing so you blundered onto a second answer. Most puzzle solvers would be content with finding one answer, and thus they are sorted into two camps: those who say Wednesday and those who say Sunday. And you know human nature: it is not enough that I am right; others must be wrong. What an ugly thing it is, brother set against brother, mother versus child. Do you wonder why I call old Pop a troublemaker. Hum!”

“So I understand I was more correct than I knew. Next to that, today’s initial salvo seems but silly. He asks whether it is possible for it to be twice as hot tomorrow as it is today?”

“More tricks up his sleeve. One is tempted to answer: of course! But I hasten to point out that it is not so simple. Certainly any number of degrees can be multiplied by 2. The question is, can it then be properly said that doing so makes it twice as hot? There are three cases. First, if the temperature is above zero, there is no difficulty save the physical limitations of the atmosphere itself. If it is 40 degrees today, it is unlikely to be 80 degrees tomorrow, but it is not impossible. Then again, if it is 80 degrees today, I should not count on it being 160 degrees tomorrow.”

“For all our sakes.” 

“Indeed. Second, if it is exactly zero degrees, you can multiply zero by 2 but your result will also be zero. Who would say it is twice as hot when there is no change at all? Third, what if the temperature is below zero? Multiply minus-5 by 2 and you get minus-10. Again, who would say it is twice as hot when it is actually colder?”

“One would say it is twice as cold.”

“Would one not. Or it is half as hot. But notice that the procedures are different. Above zero, it is hotter when you double the temperature, colder when you halve it. Below zero, the reverse obtains: colder when you double, hotter when you halve. And when it is zero degrees, you can do nothing with it at all. A similar thing occurs with percentages. If you go in with 10 pounds and come out with 20, you have increased your booty by 100%. But if you start with nothing, and climb to 20, there is no possible percentage to describe your gain. Any percentage of zero is zero.”

“I thought you cared little for mathematics, Holmes.”

“Oh, I fancy I have just enough to get by. Fractions, percentages, averages, and the like. Some rudimentary geometry for angles, areas, and volumes. A little goes a long way, I’ll vouchsafe. So what other pins does your Old Patch draw from his lachrymose pin-cushion to prick us with this morning?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Come, Watson, read.”

“Oh, well, next it seems that Farmer Grey died leaving 11 horses to his 3 sons. According to his will, the horses were to be divided as follows: one-half to his oldest son, one-quarter to his middle son, and one-sixth to his youngest son. They were in a quandary, since 11 horses cannot be divided evenly by those fractions. Then their neighbor, Mr. Brown, hit upon an idea. He added one of his horses to Farmer Grey’s horses to make it an even dozen. Now the oldest son could take one-half or 6, the middle son one-quarter or 3, and the youngest son one-sixth or 2. And since these totaled only 11, the one remaining horse went back the Mr. Brown. What say you to that?”

Holmes shook his head and began fiddling with the contents of his pipe-bowl. “It is admirable sleight of hand by the Good Samaritan neighbor, but it will not do. The trouble is that the brothers three are now in possession of more horseflesh than they are lawfully entitled to. The oldest brother has 6 horses, while his father’s will only left him 11 divided by 2, or 5 and ½ horses. Likewise, the middle brother has 3 horses when he should have 2 and 3/4, and the youngest has 2 horses instead of his allotted 1 and 5/6. All in all, Farmer Grey left his sons 10 and 1/12 horses, while the brothers collectively have 11.”

“And it all went right over my head, I’m ashamed to confess.”

“It is a small thing, I suppose, and the probate officials might well overlook it, but if it were me, I would sell the horses and divide the money. Or, if we allow the brothers to retain the horses, have them at least pay back to their father’s estate amounts sufficient to make up for the overage in their putative inheritances. And that is what say I to that.”

“You got to the bottom of it in a hurry, Holmes.”

“It simply didn’t jibe. That’s not how dividing up works, putting something in before you start, then taking that same thing out after you’ve finished. Such goings on will earn you a rap on the knuckles from any mathematics tutor, or I’ll be switched.”

“At any rate, I know you like genealogy riddles. A man is looking at a portrait and says: ‘Brothers and sisters have I none, but this man’s father is my father’s son.’ Who is the man in the portrait?”

“Elementary. We reason as follows: Assuming I am the man who is speaking, my father’s son could be me, or it could be my brother. But it isn’t my brother because that is ruled out by the ‘have I none’ part. So my father’s son is me, and this man’s father is me. Therefore the man in the painting is my son.”

“That sounds right.”

“Because it is right. But the queer thing is that many people will spontaneously say that the man in the portrait is the man who is speaking, despite there being no possible logic leading to that conclusion. Why do they say so? I suspect it is because they fear there is a trick to it. Perchance they believe that the speaker would not refer to himself as this man, so the trick is that this man must be him after all, you see? Utterly wrong, but there you have it. Still, it recalls to my mind a similar jape. Bert and Belle are sitting on a bench. Bert says, ‘The father-in-law of the lady on this bench is the father of my father-in-law.’ How are Bert and Belle related? Remember, Watson, step by step.”

“Well, the father of Bert’s father-in-law is Bert’s wife’s grandfather, call him George. Now George is also the father-in-law of Belle, so Belle is married to George’s son. George’s son and Belle are the parents of Bert’s wife, thus Belle is Bert’s mother-in-law.”

“You have one solution but there is a second. Yes, I have said that I disapprove of second solutions, but kinship puzzles are exempt, as genealogical twists and turns can lead to different arrangements. It is the nature of the beast. So Belle, as George’s daughter-in-law, is indeed married to George’s son. But George may have two sons: one of these sons is the father of Bert’s wife, the other son is the uncle of Bert’s wife. So Belle may also be the wife of Bert’s wife’s uncle.”

“By Gad, Holmes, you are right. Well, at least no ‘other side of the family’ to trip me up this time.”

“No, you were tripped up of your own accord. Just remember, look for alternate scenarios. They lurk, Watson, how they lurk! But I believe I hear our visitor on the stairs. And if he suspects his daughter-in-law has done away with his uncle over 11 horses, we shall be ready for him, or it’s a colder day tomorrow!”

 

Copyright © 2020 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

#209: Quiz Answer…

Here’s the answer to the quiz posted at the end of #208.

209.1  The degree to which you are related to someone is determined by a path consisting of a number of steps, each step being a parent-child connection. At each step, the amount of shared genetic material is cut in half. So for example, in Chart 758, assuming males, the path connecting you to your great great grandfather D contains 4 steps: first to your father A…second to your grandfather B…third to your great grandfather C…and finally to your great great grandfather D.

209.2   Now to your great great grand uncle F (the brother of your great great grandfather D) there are 6 steps, so you would expect the degree of relationship to be 1/64: it was 1/16 to D…from D to E 1/32…and from E to F 1/64. But it isn’t, it’s 1/32. What’s going on?

209.3  And the answer is this: if there is more than one path between you and your relative, you must add up the degrees of relationship from all the paths.And as you can see in Chart 759, there are 2 paths between you and F…one through your great great great grandfather E and another through your great great great grandmother Y.

209.4  So the total degree of relationship is 1/64 + 1/64 = 1/32. And from there down to X, it is again decreased by half at each step…and that is the result adding together the path through E and the path through Y. For example, 1/64 to G is actually 1/128 (through E) + 1/128 (through Y) = 1/64.

209.5   Notice that if you had continued going back to E’s father, E’s grandfather, etc., you wouldn’t’ve gone through any grandmothers, so there would have been only one path, and the degree of relationship would have been determined only from that one path.Also notice that if F were D’s half-brother instead of brother, as in Chart 760, there would have been no path to F through Y and so your degree of relationship to F would have indeed been 1/64, and then down by half for each step after that.




Copyright © 2020 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

#208: Ripped from the Headlines!

208.1  When I see a relationship mentioned in the newspaper, I like to verify it, because if there’s anything today’s journalist is worse at than math, it’s kinship. On top of that, many people believe they are related to somebody famous, and either they aren’t, or they have the relationship wrong. So here are two from the past few months. 

208.2  The Boston Red Sox have a pitcher named Chris Mazza. He says he’s related to Joe DiMaggio, and here’s the tale he tells, as related by Ft. Myers News-Press reporter Andrew Sodergren:

       “I was 9 years old and we were watching ESPN Classic and they were talking about the 56-game hitting streak and all of the sudden my brother goes, ‘You know that’s our cousin, right?’” Mazza recalled. “And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And he told me he was our grandmother’s cousin and then after that, I started learning more about Dom and Vince, Joe’s brothers, who both were big-league outfielders as well. I mean Dom played with the Red Sox for 14 years, and I didn’t realize that. He had a really good career as well.”

     Mazza said he met DiMaggio once at a family reunion when he was 6, back before he even knew who Joltin’ Joe was. “Honestly, I don’t really remember it,” he said. “And I definitely didn’t understand who he was at the time.” 

208.3  OK, this sounds legit. The trouble is, “grandmother’s cousin” is vague…presumably they meant first cousin, but who can say? Fortunately, with the internet, we are living in a golden age of genealogical research. The difficulty is finding information on people who are living, owing to “privacy” issues. It’s way easier to track down dead people than live ones. People who are still living seldom show up in family trees, although they are readily mentioned in obituaries. Here, I had to go back 6 generations from Chris, and the hardest name to find was that of Chris’s mother. 

208.4  So turns out it’s not grandmother but great grandmother. And it’s not first cousin but second cousin. Still, they are related: Chris and Joe are second cousins three times removed. That is the definition of a removed cousin: your parent’s cousin, once removed…your grandparent’s, twice removed…your great grandparent’s, three times removed. Chris and Joe share 1/256 or about .4% of their genes, and the rest, 99.6%, they don’t share. Genetically insignificant, but genealogically blood relatives, absolutely.

208.5  Still, it’s interesting to note that Chris has been quoted talking about how close the DiMaggio and Mazza families were…that may well be, but as you can see, his connection to Joe is in fact through the Siino family, not the Mazza family. And yes, you don’t see a double-I in Italian very often, but it does exist. 

208.6  While researching this connection, I was pleased to find a couple of marriage customs in Joe’s generation that you don’t see very often today, but which were par for the course back then, especially among immigrant populations.

208.7  Two of Joe’s first cousins through his uncle Sal, Thomas and Rose, married a sister and brother from the Enea family. I have that a few times in my family, the closest being two brothers of my Italian paternal grandmother who married sisters. Then we have another of Joe’s cousins, Marie, marrying  Joe’s older brother Michael. First cousins marriages are extremely rare today, albeit legal in about half the states, and in most countries around the world. But weren’t these Catholics? Sure, but there were dispensations to be had, based on a long list of mitigating circumstances, and that’s true even today, although certainly not well publicized.

208.8  Next we have the Kennedys…well, sort of. Joseph Patrick Kennedy III is actually the 4th in the family to have that name. His father is Joseph Patrick Kennedy II, not Jr., since he was named after his uncle, the oldest brother of his father Robert F. Kennedy. And the first of course was the old movie mogul and bootlegger, whose name was the reverse of his father’s, Patrick Joseph Kennedy.

208.9  But Joe III is out of the picture, at least for the time being. He gave up his House seat to challenge Edward Markey for Senator, but lost in the primaries, so for now he’s at loose ends. The focus here is on the Democrat who is running to replace him, Jake Auchincloss. That name sounds familiar, no? And not for nothing, but if it always struck you as being German, it isn’t. It’s Scottish, or more precisely Gaelic. Jake is routinely linked in the press to Jackie Kennedy and her step-father Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr. They never say how exactly, and it’s just as well because it’s pretty distant, hence complicated. 

208.10  Now Jake is surrounded by people named Hugh Auchincloss, starting with his brother, father, grandfather, and great grandfather, all doctors. And there are undoubtedly others I didn’t include on Chart 756…maybe someday. But here’s the skinny: Hugh D. Auchincloss was Jake’s great grandfather’s first cousin, so Jake and he are first cousins 3 times removed. That’s related by 1/64 or 1.56% genes in common, 98.44% not.  Jackie was Jake’s grandfather’s second cousin’s step-sister, so Jake and she are step-second cousins twice removed, if you consider your cousin’s step-sister to be your step-cousin, which I don’t.

208.11  Why don’t I? Because I limit step-relations to parents, children, and siblings. Anything beyond those is inherently ambiguous, and provides no precise information. Take step-grandfather. Is that your father’s step-father…your step-father’s father…or your step-father’s step-father? There’s no way to tell which you’re talking about, so instead you should spell it out, as I just did: “my father’s step-father” or whatever.  

208.12  And altho I chose not to include it on the chart, Jake’s paternal grandmother, Katherine Lawrence Bundy, is the sister of McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to JFK and LBJ. You know, you pick up a lot of good genealogical data from obituaries, but another less common source is wedding announcements. If they’re upper crust folks, the write-up can be extensive, and I got the Bundy connection from a New York Times article on Jake’s father’s wedding in 1973.

208.13  But I’d like to leave you with a quiz, and I’ll post the answer in a couple of weeks. Chart 757 shows the degree of relationship you have to each of the people tracing kinship to X, your fourth cousin. There are 10 steps between you and X, and at each step, the degree of relationship is half what it was…except for the sixth step, between your great great great grandfather and his son, your great great grand uncle, where the degree remains the same, 1/32. After that, it continues to decrease by half with each step. What happened at that 6th step? Give it some thought…it’s fundamental kinship theory to be sure. 

Answer at #209.

 

 

Copyright © 2020 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

#207 Can Your Mother’s Half-Brother Really Be Your First Cousin Three Times Removed?

207.1  A while back I got an email from a reader called leanko, detailing some interesting twists in her family tree and wondering if I cared to diagram them. Absolutely! BTW, I don’t know whether leanko is a he or a she, but she sounded like a she to me…easy enough to correct if I’m wrong. Of course, there are my two standard caveats: her descriptions may be ambiguous or irreconcilable, in which case I’ll do the best I can…and the conclusions leanko has drawn may not be accurate. But that’s why you bring it to me, nez pah? So here’s her story…

207.2  And right away we do see an ambiguity: grandmother A‘s half-sister B married C, who is called a maternal uncle “of hers.” Who is “her,” A or B? It sure sounds like C is B‘s uncle (chart 747, left side) in which case we have what’s known as an avuncular marriage…an uncle marrying his niece. Down through history, this was not uncommon in some cultures, ancient Egypt for example. European aristocracy practiced it for a long time, contributing to a weakened gene pool and the scourge of hereditary defects. The worst example was Charles II of Spain, last of the Habsburgs, who died without heir in 1700, sparking the War of the Spanish Succession. His parents were uncle and niece, as were 2 pairs of great grandparents, and he was beset with a multitude of physical and mental disabilities.

207.3  But avuncular marriage died away in most of the western world during the 1700s and today is illegal practically everywhere…altho not, according to the internet, in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Finland, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Russia. Huh. I was going to say why ban something that nobody wants to do anyway, but who knows? Still, I feel confident that we can rule it out in this case, and that A‘s half-sister B did not marry her own uncle, but A‘s uncle (chart 747, right side), since leanko goes on to describe some relations that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

207.4  And she correctly gleans that A and D are related in two ways: on D‘s mother’s side, A is D‘s mother’s half-sister, so A is the half-aunt, D is the half-niece. On D‘s father’s side, A and D are first cousins, since A‘s mother and D‘s father are siblings. The comment “sorta double cousin-ish” is also correct, although not in a genealogical sense. A half-aunt/half-niece relationship isn’t “sorta” a cousin relationship in the same way as your spouse’s cousin, your cousin’s spouse, your step-cousin, your half-cousin, or even your second, third, or beyond cousin would be. But in a genetic sense, a half-aunt and a half-niece are related by 1/8, the same as first cousins, so A and D are 1/8 + 1/8 = 1/4, the same coefficient of relationship as double first cousins.

207.5  leanko then relates D to A‘s daughter E, and does that correctly too. They are half-first cousins since their mothers B and A are half-sisters…and they are first cousins once removed since D is E‘s mother’s first cousin. They share 1/16 of their genes through each of these relationships, and 1/16 + 1/16 = 1/8, so genetically they are the equivalent of first cousins…or great grandmother/great granddaughter for that matter, but the math checks.

207.6  I don’t usually do this, but it would be interesting to look at this tree in terms of how it was for the people involved, and for that we need to know the chronological sequence of events, which we don’t, so we’ll go through the possible scenarios. If A was born first, then at some point A‘s mother died and her father remarried and had B…then eventually B married A‘s uncle, who to B was her half-sister’s uncle “on the other side,” or B‘s father’s first wife’s brother, B‘s father’s former brother-in-law.

207.7  Or let’s say B was born first, her mother died, and her father remarried and had A…then eventually B married A‘s uncle, who was now B‘s father’s current brother-in-law, or B‘s step-mother’s brother, which some people would call her step-uncle, but I wouldn’t. And there’s a third case: Suppose B married C before B‘s mother died…then after she died, B‘s father married his son-in-law’s sister, which is to say B‘s sister-in-law. Whichever way it happened, it’s unusual, but ultimately straightforward if you take it one step at a time. And in olden times people weren’t as mobile as they are today, and marriages tended to occur between people who were “around,” and those were often related to one another, by blood or marriage or both.

207.8  But there’s more…another twisty branch to the family tree…and again, there’s ambiguity…this time, the problem is “first cousin once removed.” The 1C1R relationship spans two generations, and is similar to the uncle/nephew relationship, where one person is the sibling of the other person’s parent. 1C1R “moves it over a step”…one person is the first cousin of the other person’s parent. Now when a relationship is between different generations, in all other cases the English language distinguishes between the older and younger generations: parent/child, aunt/niece, grandfather/grandson, etc. But simply saying “first cousin once removed” doesn’t do this, leading many people to think that 1C1R can actually be two different relationships, rather than two different “ends” of one relationship.

207.9  So to indicate the generations, you have to add “ascending” for the older and “descending” for the younger…cumbersome perhaps, but it gets the job done. Without that, you simply don’t know which is which. Thus when leanko says her grandfather’s first wife was A‘s first cousin once removed, we don’t know whether A is the descending, that is, the 1C1R is A‘s parent’s first cousin (Chart 749, left)…or A is the ascending, in which case the 1C1R is the daughter of A‘s first cousin (Chart 749, right.) So we’ll do it both ways, no biggie!

207.10  Now either grandpa didn’t have any children with his first wife, or leanko doesn’t know of any, because she imagines a son, I’ll call him X, and how she’d be related to him. Related through her grandpa, she’s right to say X would be her half-uncle, since he’s her mother’s half-brother. But where she gets first cousin three times removed as the relationship through grandma A is anyone’s guess…as you can see in Chart 750, 1C3R is wrong. If A is the descending, then X and leanko are 2C2R…if A is the ascending, then they’re third cousins.

207.11  Your 1C3R is either your first cousin’s great grandchild, or you great grandparent’s first cousin…Chart 751 shows what the latter looks like, and as you can see, both possibilities miss X. But bear in mind that we’re doing this based on the assumption that the relationships leanko mentions are the only ones there are. Is there any way that X and leanko could be 1C3R? Yes, and here are several.

207.12  On the left side of Chart 752, leanko’s grandfather and her grandmother A‘s grandfather are brothers. That makes X and A‘s mother, leanko’s great grandmother, first cousins. leanko is 3 steps down from her great grandmother, thus 1C3R to X. True, grandpa’s second wife A was his grand niece, but they’re only related by 1/8, same as first cousins, which despite much current squeamishness among younger people in the US, has been acceptable in practically every culture down through history and still is in most of the world today.

207.13  On the right, we make X‘s father the brother of leanko’s great great grandfather on her father’s side…and thus leanko’s mother E married her 1C2R, related by 1/32, equivalent to second cousins. But this also makes leanko 1C3R to her own mother and second cousin to her paternal grandfather. Can we do it without relatives marrying each other? You betcha…

207.14  In Chart 753, leanko’s mother E has married her half-brother’s great great grand uncle on the other side (not through A‘s family)…yes, E‘s husband is her grandmother’s sister’s husband’s uncle, but there’s no blood relationship there. And admittedly the ages are going to be out of whack…one way I did it had leanko being born when her father was 85 years old, but I reckon stranger things have happened. So that’s pretty much that. Do you have a twisted family tree you’d like to see dissected? Leave a comment and it ought to zip straight to my email as leanko’s did.

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Copyright © 2019 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

#206 Quiz Ascending, Descending…

206.1  There are two ways you and I can be blood relatives. We can be direct relatives, meaning parent/child, grandparent/grandchild, great grandparent/great grandchild, etc. All other relationships are called collateral. And to be related collaterally, one of three things must be true:

1. You and I are descended from a pair of siblings or half-siblings.
2. One of us is descended from the sibling or half-sibling of the other.
3. We ourselves are siblings or half-siblings.

206.2  …which is a roundabout way of saying when confronted with a tangled briar-patch of a family tree, look for siblings!

206.3  And in Chart 743, the siblings aren’t hard to find. So how are you and B related? Checking the left side of Chart 744, your grandfather and B‘s father are brothers (green). The children of these brothers, your father and B, are first cousins (brown). So you and B are first cousins once removed (purple)…B is ascending, you are descending. In Spanish B would be your second aunt, you would be B‘s second nephew.

206.4  On the right side of Chart 744, your father and A‘s grandfather are brothers (green). The children of these brothers, you and A‘s father, are first cousins (brown). So you and A are first cousins once removed (purple)…you are ascending, A is descending. In Spanish you would be A‘s second uncle, A would be your second niece.

206.5  As to how A and B are related to each other…in a complicated tree like this, be on the lookout for multiple ways. To many people, it never occurs to them that two people can be related to each other in more than one way, unless they have such a thing in their family.

206.6  I have a few but very distant, like 6th or 7th cousins. But there are some other interesting connections. Like two of my paternal grandmother’s brothers married a pair of sisters. The resulting offspring were double first cousins to each other, although merely “regular” first cousins to my father. A son of this grandmother’s first cousin married the sister of the man who married one of my father’s sisters. This means that some of my first cousins have first cousins who are also their third cousins…these third cousins are also my third cousins, but not my first cousins. And on my mother’s side, my maternal grandfather’s first cousin married the second cousin of our old milkman, the one with the toothpick…just sayin’.

206.7  Anyway, A and B are indeed related two ways. Left side of Chart 745…B‘s father and A‘s great grandfather are brothers. B and A‘s grandfather are first cousins. B and A‘s father are first cousins once removed. B and A are first cousins twice removed.

206.8  On the other side, right side of Chart 745…B‘s mother and A‘s grandmother are sisters. B and A‘s mother are first cousins. B and A are first cousins once removed. In both cases, B is  ascending, A is descending.

206.9  BTW…the origin of this quiz is instructive. How is your first cousin once removed ascending (B, here your father’s first cousin) related to your first cousin once removed descending (A, here your first cousin’s daughter)? They are first cousins twice removed, but with an important caveat: This assumes that the 3 of you are in the same family, in this case descendants of the “green” parents, left side of Chart 746.

206.10  But A and B can be related to each other on the “other side”…having nothing to do with you, thru the “yellow” parents in Chart 746. And as such, A and B can be almost anything…center of Chart 746, they are first cousins…right side, they are first cousins twice removed. So let’s be careful out there…

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Copyright © 2018 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

#205: Who Was That Masked Nephew?

205.1  In the movie “A Christmas Story,” they mention the quiz question: What is the name of the Lone Ranger’s nephew’s horse? I never knew the Masked Man had a nephew. Did he really?

205.2   Not to start with, no. The Lone Ranger was invented as a dramatic radio series on WXYZ in Detroit in 1933. His origin: a posse of six Texas Rangers, lead by Captain Dan Reid, is ambushed by Butch Cavendish and his Hole-In-The-Wall Gang. All are killed except Dan Reid’s younger brother John, who is left for dead. Revived by Tonto, he dons a mask made from his dead brother’s vest and becomes you-know-who.

205.3  Now among purists, there is even a debate about whether the Lone Ranger’s first name really is John. The claim is made that on the radio show a first name is never mentioned. Do all episodes still exist? Has somebody listened carefully to each and every one of them? At any rate, the theory is “John” came from somewhere else…a movie?…a published story?…nobody is sure where. But for our purposes, we will assume the Lone Ranger is John Reed…and as such, he rides through almost a decade of thrilling adventures, until the fad for juvenile sidekicks catches up with him in December, 1942…

205.4  …when a five episode arc culminates with “A Nephew is Found,” broadcast on Christmas day…and it is discovered that young Dan Frisby is actually Dan Reid, Jr. It seems that 15 years previously, Grandma Frisby was in a wagon train heading west along with Captain Reid’s wife Linda and their infant son. Linda is killed by Indians, and Grandma Frisby adopts the child as her grandson. Is the boy’s name really Dan? Grandma named him that because of a locket that contained two pictures, one of Dan Reid and his wife, the other of younger brother John. The Lone Ranger takes off his mask and Grandma Frisby now knows Dan’s true identity. Her dying words: “Ride on forever, Lone Ranger, with Danny at your side.”

205.5  Interestingly, the same radio people who invented the Lone Ranger also came up with the Green Hornet in 1936. Years later, in a November, 1947 episode, Britt Reid reveals to his father Dan that he is the Green Hornet. Dan recalls that as a youth he rode with another masked vigilante…and we briefly hear the Lone Ranger theme. This makes the Lone Ranger the grand uncle of the Green Hornet, all neat and tidy.

205.6  Except it gets complicated…it shouldn’t, but it does. And it shouldn’t because I daresay virtually every baby boomer who watched the short-lived Green Hornet TV series thought they were seeing the Green Hornet…that is, the Britt Reid from the radio series that their parents listened to. But these many years later, doubt creeps in. For example, Uncle Wiki cites a scene with Britt and reporter Mike Axford in the first TV episode “Silent Gun” and concludes that it “hints Britt’s father was the first Green Hornet”…by which they mean, the TV Green Hornet is the son of the radio Green Hornet. But as happens way too often, the Wikipudlians are dead wrong!

205.7  The scene in question has Britt authorizing payment to an “informant” for a news story, and Mike recalls when Britt’s father did the same thing…”I remember we once paid $5000 to an axe murderer!”  Thus it establishes…it does not “hint”…that Britt’s father was once the publisher of the Daily Sentinel newspaper, nothing more. And this resembles the backstory of the radio series: Britt’s father Dan owns the paper, and makes his playboy son Britt publisher to keep him out of trouble…even assigning Mike as his bodyguard. And of course Dan was never the Green Hornet, Britt was…he was inspired to do so when gangsters frame his father, who is sent to prison.

205.8  And while I haven’t seen all the TV episodes, it’s interesting to note that in a 5-minute test film with Jay Murray as the Hornet, his father is named father Henry Reid. But jump ahead to 1989, and NOW Comics reboots the franchise, with Britt Reid II, nephew of the original, now the Green Hornet. He eventually has a heart attack and is replaced by his nephew Paul Reid. Mercifully, the company went out of business in 1995. This obviously isn’t canonical, or “real” even in the fictional sense. Then we have Dynamite Entertainment Comics who in 2006 re-wrote the Lone Ranger saga to make both Dan and John Reid mere rangers, under the command of their father Captain James Reid…not to mention that in the 2011 Green Hornet movie, Britt’s father is also named James.

205.9  But getting back to your question, Dan Jr.’s horse was named “Victor.” This factoid ties into the question of exactly when “A Christmas Story” is supposed to take place. It had long been assumed that the year is 1940, since the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring shown is of the style introduced in 1940. Then somebody noticed that the calendar on the wall in the dinner scenes has the first of December falling on a Friday. That makes it 1939, in line with the department store sequence, as “The Wizard of Oz” also came out in 1939. But how could they know about Dan Reid Jr. who didn’t exist until 1942? Put together with all the other irreconcilable clues, the answer is: no exact year is possible. Cool movie though, sez me….and away!!

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205.10 My friend Zoë says her Aunt Annie is also her cousin. Can that be possible?

205.11 Yes, it’s completely possible, owing to the old kinship truism that we have two distinct groups of relatives, those on our mother’s side and those on our father’s side. Thus 2 people can be related in one way on one side, and in another way on the other side. Your case would occur if two brothers married a woman and her daughter. Say Annie and Zoë’s fathers are brothers, making Annie and Zoë first cousins. And suppose that Zoë’s mother is the daughter of Annie’s mother, making Zoë the niece of Annie, right? Well, almost right, as diagrammed in Chart 741.

205.12   The sticking point is this: who is Y‘s father, Zoë’s grandfather? It’s either Annie’s father B or somebody else. And if it’s Annie’s father, that means one of the brothers married his niece!

205.13   This does not queer the deal at all…down thru history, and in many cultures today, this is perfectly acceptable…it’s called an avunculate marriage, and while illegal in the US, it is legal in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, Australia, France, and Russia. In some parts of India, a man can marry his sister’s daughter, but not his brother’s daughter. Interestingly, the marriage of a woman and her nephew is virtually unheard of.

205.14   And avunculate marriages occurred among European royal families as recently as the 1800s, so Chart 742a, while hardly likely, cannot be entirely ruled out. More likely however is Chart 742b…Zoë’s grandfather is not B but somebody else…and now we are dealing with step-relations and half-relations. Assuming X already had Y when she married B, this would make Zoë’s mother her father’s brother’s step-daughter. And Zoë is not Annie’s sister’s daughter but Annie’s half-sister’s daughter….Annie and Zoë are half-aunt and half-niece, not aunt and niece.

205.15  To sum up: if one of the brothers married his niece, what you describe is perfectly correct. If not, then it’s first cousins by blood on one side,  but half-aunt and half-niece on the other side. Either way, an interesting tangle…ain’t love grand?

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Copyright © 2015 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

#204: Presidents, Etc.

204.1  Not counting fathers, sons, grandfathers and grandsons, which two American presidents are the most closely related?

204.2   No brothers or first cousins have ever been president. In recent times, the Kennedys were of course a near miss, and Jeb Bush bears watching. A research project for another day would be to investigate siblings and first cousins with presidential aspirations…the Tafts and Rockefellers are two recent families worth looking at…wealthy clans for whom public service was of special importance. 204.3  Chart 736 shows the direct descendants…John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, and the Bushes. John Scott Harrison is the only individual whose both father and son were president, which just another way to say that William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison are the only grandfather/grandson pair. The “middle” Harrison served 4 years in the House representing Ohio, and after death was the victim of a bizarre grave-robbing scheme, which see. 204.4  Beyond these, the most famous collateral presidential relationship would be Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who were fifth cousins. FDR’s wife Eleanor was Teddy’s niece, the daughter of his brother Elliott, making FDR and his First Lady fifth cousins once removed. And there are some fascinating twists and turns here, like FDR’s father James Roosevelt’s blood relationship to his first wife, and his courting of another relative…you can read about that here: Related How Again #35. Franklin and Eleanor were one of those unusual couples who had the same surname before they married. But the Roosevelts are not the closest collaterals… 

204.5  …because that would be 4th president James Madison and 12th president Zachary Taylor who were second cousins. Say “second cousins” today and you often get a blank stare in response. Hopefully, constant readers of this blog will find their own stares becoming less and less blank! But just as “first cousins” means two of their parents are siblings, “second cousins” simply means two of their grandparents are siblings, no more, no less. 204.6  As per Chart 737, Madison’s paternal grandmother Frances Taylor Madison and Zachary Taylor’s grandfather, also named Zachary Taylor, were siblings. And although the elder Zachary was 7 years older than his sister, their presidential grandsons were born 33 years apart, hence 11 presidents and 32 years between their administrations. 204.7  Oddly enough, when ranking the closeness of collateral presidents, 8th president Martin Van Buren was actually more closely related to Teddy Roosevelt than FDR was, owing to their Dutch ancestry. Van Buren was a 3rd great grandchild and Teddy a 6th great grandchild of one Cornelis Laurens. As third cousins three times removed, they are 1/1024 related, twice as close as the two Roosevelts at 1/2048. Genealogically significant, genetically not so much.

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204.8   We’re having an argument at work. I say a man can be your first cousin while his son is also your first cousin. Everybody else says I’m nuts. Who’s right?

204.9  You, of course! But before I explain why, a couple of stipulations. It is common for someone to refer to their first cousin as their “cousin”…and their first cousin’s child also as their “cousin,” a simplification of the correct “first cousin once removed descending.” So in this sense, father and son could both be your “cousin.” I will approach your question from the literal viewpoint…both father and son must literally be a first cousin to you. Further, we’ll try to do it without any interbreeding, which is to say, nobody is our scenario has married a close blood relative…capeesh?

204.10  So…let’s say you have a first cousin named Bart and he has a son Sam. Now without knowing anything else about your family tree, we can say that you and Sam are first cousins once removed. But the fact is that two people, in this case you and Sam, can be related in more than one way…since everyone has two sets of non-related ancestors: their father’s side and their mother’s side. 204.11  We will suppose that you and Bart are first cousins because your fathers are brothers, as per Chart 739. All we need is for Sam’s mother and your mother to be sisters, and you and Sam are also first cousins. That almost seemed too simple, didn’t it? And as a bonus, since Bart is married to your aunt, so in a sense Bart is your “uncle” as well as your first cousin.

204.12  Thus you are Bart’s first cousin on your fathers’ side, Sam’s first cousin on your mothers’ side. Do you get the nagging feeling that Bart married a blood relative? No such thing. Bart married his blood uncle’s wife’s sister. It’s unusual, but assuming his uncle didn’t marry a relative, neither did Bart.

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 204.13  Watching some of my favorite cheesy sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 60s, the name of novelist and screenwriter Ib Melchior sometimes pops up. But what the heck kind of name is “Ib”?

204.14  Oh, yeah…Reptilicus, Angry Red Planet, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Journey to the Seventh Planet, The Time Travelers, Planet of the Vampires…wonderful. He was from Denmark, and was born Ib Jørgen Melchior. But Ib is in fact a Danish nickname for Jakob or Jacob, as is Jep and Jeppe. Right now you might be asking, well, why isn’t it “Ob”? I don’t honestly know, but then I don’t mind a little mystery in life, know what I mean? 204.15  But wait…now that I think about it, you ought not confuse Ib Melchior with Disney cartoonist Ub Iwerks. He was born in the province of Frisia in northwest Germany, close to Denmark, so it should come as no surprise that his given name Ubbe is a Danish form of Urban or Urbanus. But when it came time to put credits on the screen, “Ub” was unusual enough that it was sometimes thought to actually be two letters, appearing as U.B. Iwerks.

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Copyright © 2015 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

#203: Meatballs! Part II

203.1  As we saw last week, the Swedish words for the members of the nuclear family…father/mother, son/daughter, brother/sister…are readily identifiable to native speakers of English…in fact the word for “son” is the same. This is not surprising, since English and Swedish both belong to the Germanic family of languages, as shown in Chart 730…I have included another member, Dutch, for no other reason than the intriguing Star Wars connection.

203.2  And while there is a certain amount of compounding in English…grand+mother, great+grand+nephew, half+3rd+cousin…we have nothing like the compounds indicated in Chart 730 in green…they almost resemble Legos pieces clicked together…BTW, Legos invented in Denmark. This Swedish convention is also unique in the Nordic or Scandinavian sub-family of languages. These include Danish and Norwegian, which together with Swedish are mutually intelligible among native speakers of those three languages…plus Islandic and Faroese, which are less so. Finnish is not a Germanic language, but belongs to a group that includes Hungarian and Estonian. Even so, about 5% of Finns speak a dialect of Swedish as their native tongue, and vice versa.

203.3  But we’ll start Part II of our tour of Swedish kinship with cousins, and it’s a double dose…

203.4  …because there are 2 basic ways to refer to what I call your “numbered” cousins. On the right, männing means relative or kinsman…and the prefixes are literally the Swedish words for 1, 2, 3. As we shall see, there are different words for 1st, 2nd, 3rd. If you have a mathematical bent, you no doubt recognize the former as cardinal numbers, the latter as ordinal numbers. “1” for sibling and “2” for 1st cousin are archaic and not normally heard…I suppose they could pop up in genealogical discussions, nez pah? But this inconvenient convention, at least across languages, means an xth cousin in English is an (x+1) relative in Swedish…can’t be helped.

203.5  These männing terms for cousins are the most commonly used, and have their direct counterparts in the other Nordic languages. But Swedish has a second set of words for cousins…the –ling group…which are more old-fashioned, and today likely to not be understood by a good portion of the younger generations…sound familiar? The obvious disadvantage is that you have to “invent” a different word for each degree of cousin…with the männing terms, you simply continue counting…sju, åtta, nio, tio  for 7, 8, 9, 10, and so forth.

203.6  How did these special -ling terms originate? If you noticed S for sister/syssling and B for brother/brylling, you’re on the right track. Syssling originally mean the son or daughter of one’s aunt or parent’s sister…and brylling, of one’s uncle or parent’s brother. The meanings eventually changed, migrating over to more distant cousins.

203.7  Pyssling has several meanings in Swedish…a small person, pygmy, or runt…but also what we would call a “wee person”…a fairy or elf. Amusingly, Google Translate returns “Leprechaun” for pyssling, and indeed this sense has extended to Femmånningar, the plural of femmånning, which in Swedish means “the Little People.” Obviously elves have nothing to do with the number 5, but that’s language for you.

203.8   In Swedish trassling also means tangles or entanglements, and can be used in a general sense to refer to distant relatives. None of this has anything to do with brissling, the juvenile stage of the fish we eat as a sardine…and “brisling”…with a single “s”…is an English word taken from Swedish…which is why you see it on cans at the grocery store. Perhaps you thought it meant something fancier than “small fish” but I’m afraid it doesn’t…which is how marketing works.

203.9  To further complicate things, there are several regional variations on cousins…and those for northern Sweden in red do use the ordinals…1st, 2nd, 3rd. On the island of Gotland in yellow, they use letters of the alphabet. And the southern Swedes (green) and Swedish-speaking Finns (blue) have their own words for 2nd cousin…”small” and “next” seem eminently appropriate to me.

203.10  So far, so good. We now come to that sticking point in English, cousins removed…and in Swedish, the descending (descendants of your cousins) and the ascending (cousins of your ancestors) are dealt with differently. For the children, grandchildren, etc. of your cousins, you simply do what you do with your own grandchildren, nieces, and nephews…apply the appropriate sequence of sons and dotters…or the appropriate number of barns…and you’re done. No removeds to fuss with going in that direction.

203.11  In the other direction, different story. We need to look at what I call a Cousin Ladder…designating how you are related to each of your cousin’s direct ancestors, back to your common great/grandparent ancestors. The sources I found on the net, including Oom Wiki, were no help…I was pleased to finally find a chart by a Swedish lady named Emmy, reproduced as Chart 733 with my additions in red.

203.12  And as an aside, släktskapsdiagram means kinshipchart or relationshipgraph…as a Germanic language, Swedish has the tendency to run words together, altho without nearly so much abandon as the German language itself does. And wouldn’t you know it, the German record-setters are found in bureaucratese…mind you, the Germans own up to doing this and even have a word for it…bandwurmwörter  or “tapeworm words”…ha!

203.13  But these come and go…several years ago the 67-letter monstrosity grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung meaning “regulation governing the delegation of authority pertaining to land conveyance permissions” was retired, leaving the 63-letter rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz  or “law concerning the delegation of duties for the supervision of cattle marking and the labeling of beef” the reigning champ…altho I believe that was recently ditched too. One wonders how you realistically deal with such words, and the answer is by abbreviating…like this: RkReÜAÜG.

203.14  At any rate, Emmy’s Cousin Ladder is pretty anticlimactic…there are no words, compounded or otherwise, for your cousin’s parents, grandparents, etc. …you simply spell it out…for example, your 4th cousin’s grandparent, what we’d call your 2nd cousin twice removed ascending, is your “mother or father’s parent’s 2nd cousin.” Which, surprise surprise, is precisely the best way to say it in English too…and when you think about it, it’s equivalent to our removed system, since “twice removed” here literally means “your grandparent’s”…the fact that people don’t recognize this is the primary season they get so bollixed up with removeds in the first place.

203.15  What’s left to look at is the uncles and aunts…the siblings of your direct ancestors…back beyond your parents’ generation. Here again, there are 2 ways to do it…comparing Emmy’s chart with Wikipedia’s above, and looking at the Cousin Ladder for your 3rd cousin as an example…Wiki does it with gammel = “old”…Emmy does not… you can dissect the particulars if you like, bearing in mind that bröder, a word I don’t believe we’ve seen yet, is just the plural of bror or brother.

203.16  What is of significance, if we can believe Onkel Wiki’s diagram, is that uncles and aunts, that is, siblings of your direct ancestors, accumulate multiple gammels the further back you go, whereas those direct ancestors themselves do not…with them, a single gammel signals you’ve moved past your parent’s parent…and from there back it’s an ever-increasing litany of parent’s parent’s parent’s parent’s parent’s whatever. If this reminds you of the “great uncle” controversy…where using that terminology instead of “grand uncle” gives you a direct ancestor and his brother, of the same generation, who are identified with a different number of “greats”…well, it should, sad to say.

203.17  A couple final thoughts…Swedish has halvkusin for half-1st cousin, as well as dubbelkusin for double 1st cousin. And while halvbror and halvsyster are your half-siblings, these terms can also refer to step-siblings…context is key, I guess. Such odd words as halvson and halvdotter exist, again meaning steps…and the opposite of these would be “2nd mother” or “2nd father” instead of step-mother/father. At the same time, styv in front of anything indicates a step-relative…go figure.

203.18  Helbror and helkusin  are full brother and full cousin, as opposed to half…hel can mean “full” in Swedish but is here closer to “whole.” Svår  means “hard” in the senses of difficult or severe…but it also signifies in-laws…svårfar, svårmor, svårson, svårdotter…the word for law is lag. But brother-in-law can be both svårbror and svåger…sister-in-law, svårsyster and svågerska…their word for “nepotism” is svågerpolitik…politik means politics but also policy.  And since in English, the word “degree” can mean any number of things when applied to kinship, I’ll just mention such a phrase as släkting i andra led…”relative in the second degree”…without further investigation.

203.19  But like it or not, languages evolve. Swedish has a small but earnest “gender-neutral” movement afoot…I leave it to you to figure what grievances such neologisms as mappor, pammor, and broster  are intended to ameliorate…they don’t look gender-neutral to me, not completely anyway, but then again it’s not my language. Ciao for niao…

wicked ballsy

…but before I go, Uncle Wiki also has a chart for Danish, with the same basic layout as the Swedish chart. There are many interesting nooks and crannies…but what caught my eye was 2nd cousin called “half-cousin”…halvkusine…and 3rd cousin being “quarter-cousin”…kvartkusine… with corresponding half- and quarter- uncles and aunts. Reminds me of Spanish and their 2nd uncles and 3rd aunts…difference is, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th would easily extend such a scheme indefinitely…1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, if that’s in fact how they do it, less elegantly, but still possible. But that’s a research project for another blog.

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Copyright © 2015 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

#202: Meatballs! Part I

202.1  Today, a look at Swedish kinship terminology …but we’re going to start waaaay off-topic, with the possibility that aliens from space are living undetected among us. Could be? Probably not, but at least we can be confident that the only player in Major League history to hit 3 home runs over the course of 2 innings is not from Mars…that’s Nomar Garciaparra…No-Mar…Not Martian, get it?

202.2  Which brings us to one of my favorite Christmas movies, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, from 1964. This film has a reputation as being one of the worst movies of all time, but undeservedly so in my opinion…it’s a kiddie flick after all, and viewed thru little eyes I can’t see it being all that terrible. It has a great theme song by Milton DeLugg, featuring fake Al Hirt trumpet fills by Roy Alfred…Al would record his own version…and some truly memorable moments, like when the Martians first confront the 2 Earth children…they ask what’s that sticking out of your heads and one Martian answers: Our antenna. And the girl asks: Are you a television?

202.3  This movie features the first screen appearance of an 8-year-old Pia Zadora…see today’s wicked ballsy…and is also said to contain the first portrayal of Mrs. Claus, beating TV’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by mere weeks…that’s a research project for another day…altho quite frankly, I doubt it’s true, but who knows. What concerns us today however is the names of the Martian leader and his family.

202.4  They are Kimar…for King Martian, pronounced key-mar….Momar, mother Martian…Bomar, boy Martian…and Girmar, girl Martian (that’s Pia.)  As I said, this is a children’s movie and can’t be analyzed too deeply…like, what are all the other Martian boys and girls named? And why isn’t is Quemar for Queen Martian? But sure, you could say these names are kind of silly….until you realize that there is a language…Swedish…that does the same exact thing with it’s basic kinship terminology.

202.5  As a starting point, I used the Swedish Wikipedia’s article on Släkt  or Kinship…it’s written in Swedish of course…and a few other Swedish articles. Google’s translation service is much improved since the last time I checked and did a decent job…and much could be gleamed from context. The colorful chart, above is also from Uncle Wiki…and it takes some shortcuts…specifically, with respect to parents. The black square labeled Jag is you…literally “I”…and your parents are collectively labeled Föräldrar  which means “parents.”

202.6  My Chart 727 uses the individual words for father and mother…Far and Mor…and shows how they are compounded to form other kinship terms. These are listed in Chart 728.  And FYI, the words Nevö and Niece for your siblings’ children do exist in Swedish, borrowed from the French…but they are considered quite snooty, like in English calling your parents “Mater” and “Pater.”

202.7  One important point: while the Swedish language kinship terms are clearly different from English, their system of relationships is the same as ours. There are systems of kinship where not only the terms, but the relationships themselves are different. For example, in a system where you can marry cross cousins (children of your father’s sisters and your mother’s brothers) but not parallel cousins (children of your father’s brothers and your mother’s sisters), these 2 groups of cousins are seen as different relationships. In fact, in some languages, a single word is used to refer to both siblings and parallel cousins…that is, those of your generation whom you can’t marry. As another example…in a strictly matrilineal system, your “uncle” is your mother’s brother…your father’s brother is not related to you at all!

202.8  But to Swedes, your uncle is still your uncle…the difference is, their word spells out the side of the family: farbror and morbror…and we can do that in English too…it’s just that we have no single words, but must use phrases: father’s brother and mother’s brother….or uncle on my father’s side and uncle on my mother’s side. I read one native speaker of Swedish commenting on how strange it was that “uncle” and “aunt” in English didn’t specify which side of the family. Then again, Swedish has no words that literally mean uncle and aunt in the sense that English does. As my grandmother used to say, it’s half of one and six dozen of the other…(yes, I know…but that’s the way she would say it!)

 202.9  Now I suppose a native speaker of English, upon first seeing Chart 727, might think: wow, how logical! Well and good…but logic has its limits, truth be told. How do you take it beyond the generation of grandparents and grandchildren, and we’ll use Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip as an example. Both are the great great grandchildren of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. If you wanted to, especially in a genealogical setting, you could literally spell it out…Elizabeth is a sonsonsondotter and Philip coincidentally happens to be a dotterdotterdotterson. But in common practice, it’s more convenient to say something more generic, as show in Chart 729. 

202.10  So both are now a barnbarnbarnbarn meaning your “child’s child’s child’s child.” On the internet there is some disagreement about whether and where you should insert spaces and letters “s”…forgive me if I don’t have the stamina this Christmas season to sort it all out…hoping Santa will ask some native Swede to help! But going down thru direct descendants, it’s just that simple.

202.11  Going up thru direct ancestors, it’s a bit more complicated. The Swedish word for “parent” is förälder…plural föräldrar. But as you can see in Chart 729, generic grandparents still specify “father’s parent” and “mother’s parent”…perhaps as a sign of respect for the older generation. Then back from there, you stop specifying and use the word gammel, meaning “old.” I should also note that stor, meaning big or large, is sometimes used going down, as storbarnbarn  for great grandchild…but this usage seems infrequent, so I haven’t included in in Chart 729…pending further developments, of course. It is more common as storebror and storasyster, meaning big brother and big sister.

202.12  In short, Swedish has its own conventions…twists, turns, and work-arounds, just as English does….and every language does. And what about cousins, removed or otherwise? Stop by next week for a second helping of Swedish meatballs!

wicked ballsy

Ahem…well…it’s not gentlemanly to look up a grown woman’s skirt, let alone an 8-year-old’s. Still, this is what you see in the movie, clear as day. And let’s face it, Pia didn’t grow up to be a shrinking violet, if you get my drift and I think you do…

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Copyright © 2014 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved