Double First Cousins

This house belonged to a cousin in my family, or at least I think it did. If it wasn't this house, then it was another house, very similar in design and on the same road where this one is located. My mind is slightly hazy on the exact details as I had not traveled down this road since I was a child. Three or four years ago, however, I had a chance to be on this road again and memories came rushing back.

Most people probably know what a "first cousin" is — it's when one of your parents is the brother or sister of one of the other person's parents. This relationship is diagrammed on the left-side of the following artwork.

However, what if one family had two children, another family had two children, and the children of one family married the children of the other family. The resulting third generation of offspring would be "double first cousins."

That's what happened with the people who owned the house shown at the top of the post. My mother is depicted as the figure in orange and her double first cousin is shown in green at the bottom of the right-side of the diagram. Their fathers were brothers from one family and their mothers were sisters from another family.

In the part of the world where I was raised, children always addressed adults with a title of respect and never by their first names, alone. So, it was always "Aunt Marcia," "Uncle Ray," and so forth. Regular cousins were always called by their first name, though, even if they were much older. The "double first cousin" phenomenon was the only situation where "Cousin" was used as an honorific by those of us in a younger generation, and I called the lady in green (above) "Cousin Olivia" and "Cousin John" was her husband.

^{(Actually, her name wasn't "Olivia" — her real name isn't being used here for online privacy reasons.)}

In official parlance of genealogy, Cousin Olivia was my "double first cousin, once removed" as I was in a younger generation from her and my mother. However, Cousin Olivia's daughter, Linda, and I are double second cousins. And since Linda and I are close to the same age and in the same generation, we do not use the honorific "Cousin" but just address each other by our first names.

These double cousins of mine lived on a farm and raised crops for sale as the main part of their livelihood. I saw Cousin John rarely, as he was always kept very busy with work on the farm. My Cousin Olivia, however — although quite busy as a farm-wife and homemaker — was seen frequently when she visited other family members nearby, often to share baked goods or to give someone a ride somewhere. She was very close with my mother and one of my mother's sisters.

As a tangential note, I recall that Cousin Olivia was the one who introduced and popularized penuche icing for cakes among our family. Penuche (pronounced: pen - OO' - chee) is made with brown sugar, butter, and milk. It was quite a refreshing change from the typical cake frostings based on chocolate, vanilla, buttercream, and cream cheese.

One time when my mother had surgery in the early 1960s, Aunt Olivia cared for my younger brother and me for a week or two. We stayed at her house, quite a ways out into the country. She made arrangements for me to take the school bus from her house so I didn't miss any school during that time. Every day, I walked one-third of a mile (550m) down the dirt road from their house to the paved two-lane road where I waited for the school bus to arrive. This was my first experience with a school bus, as I usually walked to school from my parents' house, which was oddly the same distance I walked here to catch the bus. 😂

Only vague and fleeting memories remain of my time spent there, but I do recall being allowed to do some modest help in the kitchen preparing meals, and playing games after dinner. Most of my memories of Cousin Olivia were from later in life, when family gathered for visits. After her husband passed, she gave up the farmhouse out in the country and bought a modest house closer to town with the proceeds from the sale of the farm. I remember visiting her there. She also opened a small shop where she made homemade candles and home-decor craft items for sale. I still have a small book that was for sale in her shop, which she and an aunt gave me for my birthday one year.

And for those who like seeing the original photos from which my photographic art began, look below! This shot was taken from the backseat of my brother's rental car as he was driving. I'm not sure what was happening on the right-side of the photo — I opened the window before taking the shot, and the day was overcast, so it couldn't have been a reflection. Perhaps it was some dust from the dirt road that had not settled? We had driven out into the country after my mother's funeral as a tribute to her side of the family, so in my grief I might have forgotten about a car passing us right before this photo was taken. Or maybe the 'fog' is just some fairy dust from my double first cousin once removed, who passed in 2000. Maybe that was her way of letting me know that this was, indeed, the place...

So, wow... I started with a mere photograph which I wanted to share and ended up on quite a little foray down Memory Lane, didn't I? But putting these things down on the blockchain will hopefully make them available at some future point should my memory fail, or if other family members stumble upon my blog.