[felixnm]

I have 84 first cousins - 44 on my Dad's side, 40 on my Mom's. I lived in the Philippines for 3.5 years with my Dad's extended family and got to know almost all my cousins on that side. It was a great time and all my cousins were amazing. Our Christmas celebrations were the best and I still miss them, 40+ years later.

[mason55]

Funny. On the other end of the spectrum, I have zero. My dad was an only child and my mom’s brother didn’t have any kids. I have one sister.

Family events are not a thing for us.

[rayiner]

Wow. I’ve got probably 20, all on my mom’s side because she’s one of 13. My dad’s parents weren’t keeping up lol.

[AlbertCory]

I've only got 10. But I've noticed that many second cousins in the extended family are barely even aware of each other. It's too bad.

Teddy Roosevelt & FDR were even more distant than that:

https://criticsrant.com/franklin-roosevelt-biography/

Marriage to cousins of degree > 1 used to be very common.

[tptacek]

I stopped counting at 50. My number is "significantly more than 50". I asked ChatGPT; it didn't know. Too many for ChatGPT to count.

(My mom has a Brady Bunch family that combined two large Irish Catholic households; I count 13 on my dad's (Slovak) side).

[dadrian]

I have 3. For about 14 years, I had 1.

[tptacek]

COUSIN COUNT THREAD

[pvg]

replace https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders with cousin count

[tptacek]

Silence, low-cousin!

[phinnaeus]

I've got 3. I'm an only-grandchild on my mom's side.

[conductr]

I have 4. All mom’s side. I’m only grandchild on dad’s side. My only child is a male and carries my name which is really rare and would have ended with me. The burden now lies on him. He has 1 cousin on his mom’s side and because we had him later in life, with some bad luck, he lost both his grandfathers before he was even born.

It’s wild to me. I try to be thoughtful in building deep family-like connections outside of actual families to hopefully help compensate. My grandpa was an huge formative influence on me and that’s the part that saddens me the most (he doesn’t even know what having a grandpa is like).

Also our holiday gatherings aren’t huge, usually 10-20, but the family that comes is pretty far removed from nuclear just because there’s not a lot of us.

[smeej]

There was a time when I had as many living grandparents (5, as my mom's parents had divorced and married her stepparents long before I was born) as surviving siblings (1 of 3), cousins (2), aunts (1), and uncles (1 of 4) combined.

Obviously didn't happen intentionally that so many of them died so relatively young, but it was a weird thing to notice.