The Literary Exhibitionist - Knotted Family Tree

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I have a strange fascination with the actual, correct terms for extended relations. For example, when Kylar and Jaycee, both very small children, were chatting each other up at the table on Christmas Day. Kylar is my cousin Toni's youngest. Jaycee is my niece Brandi's child. I actually did the research to figure out specifically how they are related to each other: they are step-second cousins once removed. Their common linear-descendant relative is Grandpa McQuilkin, and then only by marriage (Dad's marriage to Sherri).

If I were more proficient at Excel -- and I really wish I were, but I guess I don't want it that badly, or else I would have done it -- I would create a massive spreadsheet of all my relatives, including descendants of all my grandparents as well as their siblings and their descendants. I would make it so you could click any two cells, and the term would pop up to show the precise way they are related.

Of course, I would probably be the only person who gave a shit. Whatever.

I think I got to thinking about this the most recent time because of this week's 30 Rock, in which Jack finds out his mother led a secret life. Well, that and a recent email in which Auntie Rose wrote to give me the "family grapevine" news that my cousin, Michael, and his wife are expecting their third child. I didn't even remember that they had two already.

In a subsequent response in that email thread, Auntie Rose tried to count the total number of great-grandchildren Grandpa McQuilkin has. (Note that the late Grandma McQuilkin was Auntie Rose's older sister -- by quite a bit; they were eight years apart.) This was not nearly as simple as it might seem, even if you counted by blood relatives alone, which would exclude my sisters Angel and Gina.

This was her version of the list:

Troy= 5
Christopher= 5
Toni = 3
Michael = 2+
Ben and Sandra = 2? + Ben as teenager = 1
Andrew -? (well, let?s not go into that one)
Shane = 0? (I do not know anything about Garth?s other child or her descendants)
Tammy = 0
Matthew = 0

When she got to Andrew, I laughed out loud. I'll get to that in a minute. I wrote back to tell her she forgot Jennifer and Heidi -- Grandma and Grandpa had 11 grandchildren by blood, excluding Heather, the "other child" of Garth's referenced above -- and Heidi has four and Jennifer has 3. So, excluding Andrew and Heather, that's a total of 26 great-grandchildren. If we brought in Angel and Gina, who between them have another five kids, then that goes up to 31.

Heather, incidentally, is a daughter from a previous relationship (marriage? I have no clue) Uncle Garth had before Gloria. I don't think she even had the same mom as Shane, and Gloria is not Shane's biological mother. I never got very much information at all about this Heather person, only that she has never once been a part of the McQuilkin family. The sense I get is that, for whatever reason, Heather's mom washed her hands of Uncle Garth decades ago and hasn't been heard from since. In any case, I have a blood-related cousin running around out there somewhere that I've never met. I mean, on my dad's side. My mom was adopted and Uncle David never had children, but Mom did find her three biological siblings and they had children, but a brief pen-pal period with one of them notwithstanding, I never met any of them. But that's a different story. We're on my dad's side of things here.

Do most extended families have such a convoluted history of genetics, marriage and adoption? Or is mine weirder than most? I often suspect the latter but I don't really know. I used to marvel at how Jennifer and Heidi's family was made up of halves: Uncle Paul is father to Ben, Andrew, Jennifer and Jeidi, but Ben and Andrew's mother died when they were very young and Jennifer and Heidi came from another woman -- Caren, who, in turn, had Lewis, from another father. Thus, Ben and Andrew are in a family of four children; Jennifer and Heidi are amongst five children; and Lewis is one of three.

But Andrew, infamous, notorious Andrew, trumped them all right good. This is the guy who keeps fathering children even though the state won't let him keep them. I've lost count. Has he fathered only three? Or four? I know Braxton is the oldest and Andrew was convicted of shaking him as a baby. Braxton is severely mentally compromised. Braxton has a little sister, named Tabitha by Andrew and his girlfriend. But when the state took both children from Andrew and his crazy girlfriend whose name I can't remember now for some reason, Uncle Paul and Sara legally adopted them -- and changed Tabitha's name (which I think I'm spelling wrong) to Sarita. "Little Sara," I presume. Anyway, Braxton and Sarita are Uncle Paul's grandchildren by birth and his children by law. So in my spreadsheet, were I ever to make one, every person's connection to those two would have to be listed in two different ways.

They are the only two Uncle Paul and Sara adopted. Any further children fathered by Andrew went elsewhere.

So, okay. Let's just assume Andrew fathered three children. Then by blood, Grandpa McQuilkin has 29 known great-grandchildren. (This Heather person may always be a mystery.) Add the five from Angel and Gina, and that's 34 known great-grandchildren.

Something hit me just now. How many of these people have spent years towing the conservative line about "traditional" family. Jesus Christ. Shobhit and I are hardly the weird ones here. In fact, of the five kids Grandma and Grandpa had, my dad's the only one with a family of his own that has some genuine sense of normalcy, by comparison -- and that's in spite of two of their four kids being gay, and one of their kids being an exasperatingly unreliable drug addict. In both those cases, though, in this country that's pretty normal these days.

All four of Dad's siblings have much weirder families and/or histories: one with a son who refuses to interact with any of the extended family for "religious reasons"; one who adopted his grandchildren due to a son who is seriously more fucked up than the rest of us put together; one with an estranged daughter who pervades as a strange family secret; and one who married the man who went to jail for molesting her daughter (hmm, okay Andrew being more fucked up than everyone else might have been an exaggeration). What kind of "fucked up" claim to fame does my dad have? He's got no family secrets, no estrangements, no convicted felons. My dad is like a miracle of normalcy.

To Aunt Raenae's credit, I must say, she's actually relatively normal these days too. She used to be far more fundamentalist, twenty years ago, but whether or not she'd like to admit it, she's really loosened up -- and Shobhit and I both enjoy her company at family holiday gatherings.

I'm not inviting that entire lot to my wedding, though. Why should I? I feel like it'll be plenty big just inviting my immediate family and their descendants. I'm not super close to any of Angel or Gina's kids but since I expect I'll be invited to all their weddings and I absolutely will go if I am, I'm going to send them invites. Just today I finished up three lists for the wedding guest list spreadsheet I've got going on: actual wedding announcements to mail out (34); maximum potential guests from those 34 invitations (about 60); then people likely or even semi-likely to be there (53, so to be realistic I'd go with 45 max). That's enough mouths to feed, isn't it?

Okay, I guess I've killed enough time with this today.
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Current Music: "The Dreamer," The Moody Blues

Source: http://machupicchu.livejournal.com/1916113.html

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