No one can consciously choose their parents and relatives. By the will of fate, a person comes into the world and immediately becomes part of a chain of family ties. Many of them he may not even know about. There have been cases when people, having lived to advanced years in ignorance, suddenly found out that they have relatives, about whom they had heard absolutely nothing before. And now, to mutual joy, a single person has a half-sister or cousin's son with a large family, ready to share warmth and intimacy with a new relative.
Family - these are the people who are supposed to be, if not loved, then at least respected and appreciated. Close to us not by thoughts and life views, like friends, but by blood. By maintaining family ties, you can hope that there is someone who is always ready to lend a helping hand in time of need.
It used to be common for families to have many children. When they grew up, acquired husbands and wives, they settled near the parental home. It often turned out that entire villageswere related by kinship. And almost always everyone knew who was who and who had to. In what house does a godfather, matchmaker, cousin or second cousin live.
Now times are changing, not everyone keeps in touch with relatives. We know our close people - parents, sisters and brothers, grandparents. But when the relationship is more distant, many tend to get confused in its degrees. For example, how is your second cousin related to you? Not everyone will be able to quickly navigate and answer without hesitation. To learn how to calculate family ties, one must have a well-developed memory. Of course, it is much easier to peep somewhere than to remember that this is the son of a great aunt or uncle.
Counting will require more extensive knowledge. For example, a sibling is the son of your own parents. A cousin is the child of an uncle or aunt (i.e. a sibling of one of your parents). And the second cousin will be the son of a cousin uncle or aunt. These same uncle and aunt will be cousins or sisters of your father or mother.
Another example. To understand what kind of relatives the son of a cousin is, it is worth remembering that every child of any of your brothers or sisters (even relatives, even cousins, second cousins, etc.) is your nephew of the corresponding degree of kinship.
I confess that it is easier for me to get confused in such genealogical intricacies than to understand. It turns out that any old woman from an old village was smarter than me in matters of kinship. Butthere is nothing to be surprised - my family is just one of those that almost do not communicate with distant relatives. There has never been any desire for rapprochement either on our part or from distant relatives. Needless to say about the celebrations of the whole family or grandiose anniversaries, where "everyone is". The old customs of nepotism are not in use among us, which I sometimes regret.
I know that I have a second cousin, although I have never seen him. There are also cousins and second cousins. Isn't it time to stop regretting what you missed, and instead try to find relatives and establish communication?
