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How many cousins do you have?

AndyMick

AndyMick

LostCousins Star
The "Ancestry Insider" writes a genealogical blog which some of you may be aware of. In a post last week, he said "According to a story on Mirror.co.uk, AncestryDNA has done a study of birth rates and census data and calculated the average numbers of cousins Brits each have. A typical resident of Britain has five first cousins, 28 second cousins, 175 third, 1,570 fourth, 17,300 fifth, and 174,000 sixth cousins."

I have only 2 first cousins (both paternal and maternal uncles, only 1 each and no aunts, only had 1 child) and I haven't counted the rest yet (does FTA help?) - how about anyone else?
 
It sounds like a report that FTA could do, we'd have to wait for Alexander to respond.
 
Only 1 paternal (despite the family informally counting 2 more from an adopted Aunt) but 10 maternal. Second cousins now that's another story and I might just try to calculate when I have a spare moment!
 
Whenever I've done these calculations I've come up with rather smaller numbers, but perhaps I've been too conservative (it's complicated because our ancestors would have tended to have more children than the average couple - since they clearly couldn't have been childless).
 
Tim said:
It sounds like a report that FTA could do, we'd have to wait for Alexander to respond.
Click to expand...
FTA does do something - try sorting individuals by relationship. The problem is the alphabetic sort which causes relationships to come in a strange order.
 
AndyMick said:
FTA does do something - try sorting individuals by relationship. The problem is the alphabetic sort which causes relationships to come in a strange order.
Click to expand...
Sorting with "relation to root" works great - 19 paternal and 15 maternal first cousins for me - then I went to 2nd cousins and only 5 maternal BUT 244 paternal! I thought I had really messed up my tree somehow, but looked back to a newspaper clipping from when my gr-grandmother celebrated her 100th birthday - at that time she had 205 great grandchildren (12 children lived to adulthood).
 
AndyMick said:
FTA does do something - try sorting individuals by relationship. The problem is the alphabetic sort which causes relationships to come in a strange order.
Click to expand...
Yes, but it doesn't give you a count. Is everyone counting 1st cousins x removed as 1st cousins?
 
Tim said:
Yes, but it doesn't give you a count. Is everyone counting 1st cousins x removed as 1st cousins?
Click to expand...
Under 'relationship to root' and using my own name as root person, I just scrolled down and counted all those entries marked 2nd cousin - the others are clearly marked x removed - and I have 244. I counted 3 times to make sure!
 
I have 15 1st cousins all Maternal and I was with 6 of them (plus my sister and myself last week-end), as many of the family who can meet up once a year.
My Mum and one of her surviving SIL were also there. Sadly Mums 5 siblings are dead.
There were over 30 decedents and partners of my Maternal Grandparents there, some year we have had nearly 60.
 
I could indeed add something that counts the numbers of related cousins however what it can't do is accurately project forward how many cousins you might have as was done in the report. Unless of course I suppose I could add the report to the Lost Cousins page and call it a Cousins statistics report, then use Peters formula.

Peter what sort of cousins ratios have you projected in the past? Do you have any guidance as to how I could do such a projection report for people's trees. I'm thinking it should go on the Lost Cousins page as a sort of "if you research your collateral lines you could have X more entries to add to Lost Cousins" report. If I used the "official Lost Cousins formula" it might prove a popular incentive for people to research more side lines.
 
Alexander Bisset said:
Peter what sort of cousins ratios have you projected in the past? Do you have any guidance as to how I could do such a projection report for people's trees. I'm thinking it should go on the Lost Cousins page as a sort of "if you research your collateral lines you could have X more entries to add to Lost Cousins" report. If I used the "official Lost Cousins formula" it might prove a popular incentive for people to research more side lines.
Click to expand...
When I've calculated figures in the past I've done it on the basis that the number of cousins grows 4 times every time you go back a generation (ie twice as many ancestors multiplied by two children), then adjusted for the increase in the population over the time period. However, as I mentioned earlier, this is conservative because it doesn't take into the fact that our ancestors must have had at least one child.
 
I have 16 cousins: 4 paternal and 12 maternal (plus 3 maternal step-cousins). My father has eighteen cousins and his father had at least 36 cousins, so as a family we are upping the averages, I think! While I have a lot of cousins through my maternal grandmother, she herself had only 4 cousins, all of them on her father's side; she was an only child and none of her mother's brothers married. Only two of her father's six brothers had children.
Adding up my second cousins, there are at least 47 of them. Blimey. I know a reasonable number of them as my father was close to many of his cousins.
 
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Ok, so I have 3 cousins on my fathers side and 4 half cousins on my mothers side.
 
Pleased to find sorting by 'Relation to Root' confirmed my first cousin assessments except it upped my Paternal cousins to 3 by including the two non bloodline cousins (by adoption of their mother). The count of 10 for Maternal cousins was the same as by my own reckoning.

Strictly from 'Relation to Root' my Second Cousin count was 6 Paternal and 37 Maternal.
 
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