First What Removed Where?

At the Wiklanski reunion, I got into the whole first cousin, second cousin, removed blah blah conversation. As usual, I probably explained it badly and just confused people even more than they already where. This FAQ at Geneology.com explains it pretty well. If you scroll down a bit, there is a truncated version of a chart I was given some time ago at one of my family reunions. (I give up trying to get the table to play nice with Blogger; follow the link if you care about this stuff.)

My chart goes out to 15 generations, but the pattern is pretty clear. If two people are the same number of generations from their last shared ancestor, then they are siblings or first, second, third cousins, etc. The removes come into play when the number of generations from the last shared ancestor are different for the two people in question.