Sunday, November 28, 2004

Thanksgiving Part Two: The Cousins

Not everyone was there, of course, because time and travel obstacles got in our way. My oldest brother Kenny proposed this gathering back in the spring, before my middle brother Larry died.

We are a colorful tribe, white, black, brown and tatooed. There were five kids in my generation, eight kids in the next, and now there are eight more. Some of us have been married to one person the whole time, some of us have never married and some of us can't get married (not legally anyway). So the question of who is related to who gets complicated sometimes. I made a chart last summer when many of us were together for Larry's funeral. It was color coded by generation and included spouses and partners, sperm donors and step children, and helped us explain the concept of cousins to the younger ones. It was much too elaborate to try to reproduce here, but I'll try to make a color coded list of the generations:

Kenny > Jennifer (Catelin and Cody) and Jeff
Sherry > Lisa (Justin and Michaela) and Debbie (Emily and Tasheona)
Larry > Tracy (Zachary and Malaysia)
Dianna > Hannah and Jack
Chuck > Natasha

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the short version of our family tree. I'm proud to be part of the blue line.

Debbie

Anonymous said...

It's a good thing none of those kids were adopted children or they wouldn't be counted, would they?
Blood doesn't always mean a hill of beans. It's the real parenting that counts and the love behind it.
Ba hum bug.

Dott Comments said...

How do know that they aren't adopted?