Blood Relations

Every mark lost in this topic is lost by trying to hold the family in your head. Use one fixed notation and draw it: a plus for male, a minus for female, a horizontal line for a married couple, a vertical line downwards for a child, and members of one generation on one level.

1. A straight chain. "A's father's sister" — read the phrase from the last word backwards: a sister, of a father, of A, so she is A's aunt.
2. Pointing statements. "Pointing to a man, she said…" — solve from the far end of the statement back to the speaker, then state the relation in the direction the question asks.
3. Coded relations. A + B means A is the father of B, A − B means A is the sister of B, and so on. Decode symbol by symbol into the drawing; never try to read the whole string at once.
4. Generations. Count levels on your drawing: same level means siblings or cousins, one level down is a child, nephew or niece, two levels down is a grandchild.

The single most common mistake is reversing the direction of "of": "my father's brother" is my uncle, but "my brother's father" is my own father. Read possessives from the right-hand end backwards and the direction stays correct.

The second most common is losing track of the speaker's gender, which is often the whole question. Mark the speaker on the diagram before anything else.

Draw it: + male, − female, horizontal line = couple, vertical line = child, one generation per level · read possessives from the last word backwards · mark the speaker and the speaker's gender first · same level = siblings, one down = child or niece, two down = grandchild

Pointing to a photograph, a woman said, "She is the daughter of the only son of my grandfather." How is the girl related to the woman? → Start from the far end. Her grandfather's only son must be her own father. The girl is therefore the daughter of the woman's father, which makes her the woman's sister. Sanity check: work forward through the drawing — grandfather, then his only son who is the father, then his daughter, who stands on the same level as the woman herself; and since the woman is looking at a photograph of someone else, that daughter is her sister rather than herself.