Levels of Consanguinity

Texican with whom I share a grandfather has begun to blog. He is a talented humorist and poet and a great storyteller. The jokes and e-mails that he has sent over the years are Priceless and I'm glad that he found a forum for sharing them with a wider audience. Although our political leanings are as different as our latitudes, I know that I'll be checking Pappy's Balderdash every morning over coffee.

On another branch of the family tree, but this time on my paternal side is Louis. Our level of consanguinity is more complicated but worth a story. In the early part of the last century in a small town in Western Kentucky, a woman named Sheila married a man named Archie. Sheila had a sister named Mary who later married Archie's brother Edward. These two couples bought homes across the street from one another and between the two families raised about a dozen children who were double-first cousins. Louis is the youngest of the progeny of the double-first cousin generation, I am the oldest of the next.