If your grandparents are dead, how often do you see your first cousins?

[Anonymous]

People who are saying "it's not about grandparents" or "grandparents have nothing to do with it"...start your own thread. This thread is about the relationship between cousins after grandparents die.

Jesus people are dense.

[Anonymous]

Mom’s family ~ big group (13 first cousins) x 5/6x a year, at least, and then a few meet ups when I visit my mom with 2-4 cousins. We all agreed to a schedule of big Thanksgiving or big Christmas every other year. I try to attend every, baptism, first communion, confirmation, and graduation. We also almost always have an either a 50th anniversary or 75th birthday in the mix. We also still go on a beach vacation every other summer together. I am 5 hours away from most family.

Dad’s family- very close with one and we visit (she is nearly across country), when we get within a reasonable distance. Usually, 2-3x a year and we communicate regularly. The other 11, at weddings and funerals only.

With one exception, we saw DH first cousins at our wedding, maybe once more for 2-3. married 25 years.

[Anonymous]

I have 52 cousins on my dad’s side (he was one of 18 siblings). I barely know most of my aunts and uncles. Some of them I never met. We have a family reunion once a year and there are usually a couple hundred people there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have 52 cousins on my dad’s side (he was one of 18 siblings). I barely know most of my aunts and uncles. Some of them I never met. We have a family reunion once a year and there are usually a couple hundred people there.

PP here…I should be more specific. 52 FIRST cousins. I don’t even know how many further out.

[Anonymous]

I have four first cousins on my dad's side and four on my mom's side. I rarely see the cousins on my mom's side, all of whom are much older (10-20 years) than I. I like them well enough but we did not grow up together and we have never been close.

For my dad's side, all the cousins got together at least once or twice a year until my grandparents died. Since then I have seen only the two who are closest to me in age, which is facilitated by geography and by the fact that my father and my uncle live close to each other so all of us kids/cousins tend to visit around the same times. The other two cousins are older and live near where my grandparents lived; and having spent 40 years traveling there, we kind of feel like if they want to see us, they can travel here. They never have, so clearly they aren't that into us, and that's fine.

[Anonymous]

I almost never see my paternal cousins. I moved across the country before my grandparents died and even though I go back to visit my ILs (my parents have also moved away), I don't reach out to my cousins. My brother who stayed in the area gets together with a handful of them every few months.

I do make an effort to see a couple of my maternal cousins, but they also moved away, so it's more rare, when we happen to be traveling near each other. I see one cousin every couple years, and the other maybe every six months.

[Anonymous]

Never!

[Anonymous]

Funerals bring some out of the woodwork. Other than that FB.

[Anonymous]

I see my first, second and third cousins on a regular basis.

[Anonymous]

Never. My mom and my uncle got into a huge fight after my grandfather died (my grandmother had died a decade earlier) and none of us have spoken since the funeral.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just curious.

What does one have to do with the other?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have 52 cousins on my dad’s side (he was one of 18 siblings). I barely know most of my aunts and uncles. Some of them I never met. We have a family reunion once a year and there are usually a couple hundred people there.

Wow, who plans it? How do the logistics of something like that work?

[Anonymous]

I also come from a very large family and it depends on the cousins. I have some first cousins I think I met maybe met once 20 years ago and some I see a few times a year. In my case my grandparents aren't just deceased but my older aunts and uncles were actually significantly older than my mom, so they are gone too. Honestly don't have contact info for said cousins and age wise they're closer to my parents than to me. Probably wouldn't recognize them if we walked by on the street.

But my closer in age cousins, we'll meet up for dinner if one of us is in the other's town for work or similar. Not super close but enough to say hi.

[Anonymous]

I haven’t seen my cousins in a decade. Closeness is not a thing in my extended family. My husband sees his (out of town) cousins multiple times per year and is really close with them, because that is the culture that is promoted within his family.

[Anonymous]

Maybe once a year. We don’t have a lot in common.