Since I have been writing about plants and gardening in my last few posts I thought I might discuss a different kind of “plant” today, the family tree.  A family tree is not a real plant or a real tree, but is in fact a chart representing family relationships in a hierarchical way.

I imagine most of you already know most of the common vocabulary needed to discuss family relationships, like: mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandmother, and grandfather.  So, I thought today we’d look at some of the more advanced family relationship vocabulary you might need to use.  To do that we need a family tree to reference and for the purposes of our discussion we are going to use The Simpsons family tree below.

In all family trees you see the youngest members of the family at the bottom, with rows of older generations going up the “tree.”  You can follow the lines connecting people in the different generations to see who is the parent of whom.

Below in bold are some more advanced family relations you might need to know some day.  To better illustrate these relationships I will discuss how they are connected in The Simpsons family tree.

Siblings: this is a general non-gender related term for brothers and sisters.
Bart and Lisa are siblings.  Lisa and Maggie are siblings and sisters.

First cousins: The children of two siblings.
Bart, Lisa and Maggie are first cousins of Ling. Their mothers are siblings.

Second cousin: The children of two first cousins.
The children of Lisa and Ling will be second cousins because Lisa and Ling are first cousins.

Stepsister or stepbrother: The daughter or son of one’s stepparent (stepparent = the spouse of one of your parents)
If Homer and Marge divorced and Marge remarried with another man who had children, his children would be Bart, Lisa, and Maggie’s stepbrothers or stepsisters.  They have no genetic family relationship.

Half-sister or half-brother: The daughter or son of ones parent with another partner.
Herb is Homer’s half-brother. They both have the same father, but they have different mothers; they share one parent.

Great grandparent: The parent of one’s grandparent.
Clancy and Jackie’s parents (not shown in this family tree) are Bart, Lisa, and Maggie’s great grandparents.

If you or any of your family members are looking for more resources to learn English you can find a lot of help for the whole family at www.transparent.com.