Figuring out just how each person in your family tree is related to you is one of the more confusing aspects of Genealogy. Often, family terminology is shortened, and mixed into a whole series of other abbreviations that have something to do with Genealogy. All of this can quickly resemble a bowl of alphabet soup, and provide you with a lot of frustration.
One way to avoid much of the confusion about how you are related to other family members is to first learn more about what each of the different relationship terms means. To make things as clear as possible, I will describe how each family term relates to you. From there, you can extrapolate how these terms relate to your children, or to other family members.
Let’s start with relationship terms that apply to a direct blood line relationship. Some of these terms you already know, because you have been using them for years. Your mother is the woman who gave birth to you. Your father is the man whose genetic material directly helped to produce you. These people are your parents. Any other children these two people had are called your brother (if male) or your sister (if female). Together, your brothers and your sisters are called your siblings.
The sister of your father, and the sister of your mother, are each called your aunt. The brother of your father and the brother of your mother are both called your uncle. Now, here is the first place where things get tricky. Your uncle’s wives are also called your aunt, even through they are not genetically related to you. Similarly, your aunt’s husbands are called your uncle. In English, there is no term that signifies differentiation between an aunt or uncle who is a genetic relative, and an aunt or uncle who is related to you only because of their marriage to someone who you are biologically related to.
If your uncle and your aunt have any children, those children are called cousin. The term cousin is used for both male and female cousins, and there is no gender based term in English that is used to differentiate between the two. Also, it does not matter if your cousin is the child of your aunt and uncle on your mother’s side of the family, or if your cousin is the child of the aunt and uncle on your father’s side. You will call all of them cousin.