How many 4th cousins do you have?

[Retrograde]

9. My family records don't go back that far

Fourth cousins mean having a common great-great-great grandparent, and there's not much record past great-great, if that. My ancestors lived in parts of Europe that were largely flattened by various wars and a lot of documentation - not to mention people - didn't survive. The LDS managed to copy some church records before WWII, but it's scanty. The earliest record any of my relatives have is of a woman in the early 1700s who had at least one child but no record of a spouse. Having great-grandfathers who used a variety of names in the US, and a grandmother who loved to embellish her family stories with unlikely connections to vanished nobility didn't help.


However, my sister has met someone with the same last name as our mother, and from the same general part of Poland as her grandfather, so there may be distant relatives out there.