Is Every Stranger Your Cousin?

According to a demographic analysis by genealogy site AncestryDNA , the average Brit has 193,000 living cousins - enough to fill Wembley Stadium twice. (Source: There’s A One-In-300 Chance That Every Stranger You See Is Your Cousin)

This makes perfect sense to me. The world was a sparsely populated planet thousands of years ago so eventually we should all connect. We may connect thousands of years back or only hundreds. 

In my case, when I first moved almost 40 years ago to the town I currently live in, I met a woman who became one of my best friends. Years later she asked me to help her with her genealogy. To our great surprise and delight I found she was related to me along several ancestral lines! And the common ancestors were in the mid-1800s which is not that far back in the space of time.

Just this past year I was doing research for a client and to my surprise I found he and I are 4th. cousins. 

And of course you are almost certain to discover at some point in your family tree that you are actually a cousin to your father or mother. In fact I have a cousin relationship to both my parents. My father, for example is my 8th cousin once removed, my 9th cousin once removed, my 11th cousin once removed, my 10th cousin twice removed and the husband of my 5th cousin once removed (aka my mother!)

I wrote about how this happens in an ancestral tree in I May Be My Own Grandma.....

Have you discovered a cousin relationship to a friend, parent or spouse? 

A Relationship Calculator Helps with DNA Matches

If you are like me, whenever you get a DNA match that says the match is possibly a 3rd or 4th cousin, you can't remember or are not sure how to figure out where your common ancestor might be in your ancestry - a grandparent, a great-grandparent....??  In other words, how do you narrow the list of suspects candidates?  

I recently found this relationship chart which I love because it allows me to quickly determine that if a match is a 3rd. cousin we share 2nd great-grandparents. If the match is a 4th cousin we share 3rd great-grandparents. It's not that complicated and I wish I could remember that the common ancestor is one number less than the cousinship... but my brain won't retain that. 

On the chart I'm using, you simply look for the projected relationship, so let's say your DNA match was 5th cousin - look on the chart for 5th cousin (it is row 7, column 7). Now look UP to the top row, which in this case says "4th great-grandson or daughter". Okay that means you and your match share 4th great-grandparents. See how easy it is?

There are other charts online for understanding the term "cousin removed" and for figuring out the relationship of a person if you know their ancestry and how it connects into your family.