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Tonight, I finally got to meet friends from cohost @tsiro (richard), @bcj, and @thricedotted (li) in person, along with their friend Mouse. I had a great time filled with a lot of laughter. One of the topics brought up was the online conference that bcj and many of their friends partake in, involving 5-to-10-minute presentations. When it became my turn to talk about a presentation idea, I mentioned the following means of counting familial relationships as my most-recently-workshopped bit that I believed I could stretch to 5-10 minutes.
In a family, each and every person is related by a linear combination of the following two characteristics:
- Blood
- Law
Blood
When two people are related by blood, that means they share "blood relatives" linked by nuclear family: biological parents (1 step up the tree), biological children (1 step down the tree), or biological siblings (1 step over on the tree). We can determine the number of blood steps[1] for other specially-named relatives too, like great-grandparent (3 blood steps up), cousin (1 blood step up, 1 over, 1 down), or nephew (1 blood step over, 1 down). In each case, we aim to produce the shortest path between the starting node of the family tree and that relative.
Law
When two people are related by law, that means they are seen as relatives by some government's law. Most familiarly, we can take the nuclear family blood relative terms and add "-in-law" to the end to describe a parent, child, or sibling who belonged to one spouse who is now related via a law (in many cases, marriage) to the other spouse. A non-exhaustive list of other laws that can affect familial relations includes "adoption law", "domestic partnership law", and "divorce law."
Edge cases
Generally, each step is only one of blood or law as the type of relation.[2]
Step-
For step- relations, the nuclear family's relationships are each 1 law (the one that makes them a step- something). For instance, someone's step-son is related to them via 1 law (marriage) after which, he is considered their son.
Half-
For half- relations, it's a bit trickier. I recommend just "rounding up to the nearest blood" as we said in our group. I could see there being a schism for people who believe half-blood-related should be rounded down versus up, though.
Found Family
@bcj brought up a great point, which was that in some cases there are found families[3] where there's no formal adoption, and certainly no blood relation, yet it's clear that one person is the "found parent" or "found sibling" of the other. Perhaps there's a third characteristic to consider, but this part hasn't been ironed out as much, so I'm leaving it for now.
Ambiguity
Someone's great-aunt-in-law could be their spouse's great aunt, their great-uncle's spouse, or their uncle's mother-in-law. In each of these cases, we're talking about 2 blood steps and 1 law step. It just depends on where the law step is. While it's possible to specify the exact steps through the family tree one-by-one, this can be cumbersome compared to the syntactic sugar of using words like "uncle" or "great-aunt". That said, this cumbersomeness has to be balanced against the clarity of making sure the person understands the tree-traversal path.
Now What
With an understanding of this method, we can now really dive in:
My partner's brother's wife is related to me via 1 blood (sibling) and 2 laws (one for my partner and me, one for my brother-in-law and his wife). I therefore could refer to her as my sister-in-two-laws. Her sister has a spouse, who I am related to as a brother-in-three-laws.
While the goal of this methodology was to create a means of relating two people with a sort of elegant clarity, it also provides another benefit: family-tree-step-maxing. Your highscore number for family-tree-step-maxing is the length of the shortest path from you to the relative who is furthest away from you, yet for whom you've met each of the intervening family members along the path.
In my case, I met my partner's second-cousin's wife's mother about a year ago when she was visiting Seattle. I'm related to her via 1 law (my partner's), 5 blood (grandparent's sibling's grandson's), 1 more law (wife's), and 1 more blood (mother), for a total of 2 laws and 6 blood, or 8 steps total.
I wonder if I'll ever reach a number higher than that?