Collateral family members are people who are related to you, though not in your direct line -- cousins and their descendants, as opposed to grandparents, great grandparents, and so forth. There are many people who are only interested in direct lineage, but there are significant advantages to including more distant relatives in your research.
Just as you impact on the lives of your siblings, so your direct ancestors were impacted by their siblings and other relatives, and researching these people gives you a much more complete picture of your ancestors. Additionally, if you seem to be at a deadend, collateral names give you something to work on for a while and can even lead to new discoveries, or a better understanding of the times and places where your family has lived. At the very least they give you additional people that you can invite to that big family reunion that you may want to have some day.
To find the relationship between two people, determine how many generations each is from the common ancestor.
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e r s o n B |
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* there are some who prefer the term grandaunt or uncle, as being more in correlation with the term grandparent, but as this is a NEPA site and most of the NEPA people I know use 'great', we're going with the flow. Afterall, if we were doing NEPA recipes, we wouldn't put hotdogs in the pigs in the blanket just 'cause that's how they do it in other places...