Finding the right words to describe family connections
When I sit down to write about family history, I often get tongue-tied. I know who belongs where, but finding the right words to explain it can be tricky. Am I talking about the family I was born into, the family I married into, or the wider web of cousins and kin? Different disciplines — sociology, anthropology, genealogy — have developed terms that help to distinguish these layers of relationship. Learning and using them makes it much easier to speak clearly about where people fit.
Here are some of the most useful ones:
1. Natal Family (or Family of Origin / Birth Family)
We all start somewhere. The natal family is the family you are born into — parents, siblings, and sometimes grandparents or others under the same roof. Its role is to shape you: teaching values, language, identity, and giving you your first place in the world.
Example: The household you grew up in with your parents and brothers or sisters.
2. Conjugal Family (or Family of Procreation / Married Family)
At some point, many of us step out from our natal family and form a new unit. The conjugal family arises through marriage or long-term partnership, centred on the bond between spouses and, often, children.
But conjugal families are not permanent in the same way as blood ties. If a partnership ends, the conjugal unit dissolves — yet the children remain part of both parents’ lives through consanguineal ties. In other words, while marriages may end, parent–child bonds continue.
Example: When you marry and set up a household with your spouse, you form your conjugal family.
3. Consanguineal Family (Blood Relatives)
If conjugal families are about bonds created through marriage, consanguineal families are about bonds of blood. This category stretches beyond your parents and siblings to include grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. In many cultures, the obligations and loyalties owed to this wider kin group are just as binding, sometimes more so, than those of the conjugal household.
For anyone researching ancestry through DNA, this is the family you are tracing: the threads of connection that link you to living relatives and long-gone ancestors alike.
Lineal Consanguinity (Direct Ancestral Line)
Within the broader consanguineal family, your lineal ancestors form a direct chain stretching back through time. Lineal specifically means "in a direct line," either ascending (going up to ancestors) or descending (going down to descendants). Lineal relatives are your direct line relatives, like parents, grandparents, children, and grandchildren, while collateral relatives are the side branches: siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
In genealogy, we distinguish between lineal ascendants (your direct ancestors going up through parents, grandparents, great-grandparents) and lineal descendants (your direct descendants going down through children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren). The term comes from the idea of a straight "line" going directly up or down the family tree, as opposed to branching out to the sides.
This is the "family tree trunk" that genealogists and DNA researchers often focus on when tracing ancestry — the precise term for blood relatives who are in your direct ancestral line, rather than the broader network of all blood relatives.
Example: Your great-great-grandmother is part of your lineal consanguinity, while her sister would be a collateral relative.
4. Affinal Family (Relatives by Marriage)
Not all important ties are biological. Affinal relatives are those gained through marriage: your in-laws, step-relations, and other relatives gained through marriage. These relationships don’t show up in a DNA test, but they often play a central role in family history. Alliances created through marriage can shape property rights, social standing, and even political power.
Example: Your sister’s husband is your brother-in-law — an affinal relative.
Now that we've defined these different types of family relationships, here's how they all connect in a typical kinship structure:
We are born into our natal family and move beyond it when we make our conjugal family. Our natal family connects us to our ancestral consanguineal relatives (both our direct ancestral line and collateral relatives like aunts and cousins). In contrast, our conjugal family both creates new consanguineal ties (our descendants) and gives us new affinal relatives (in-laws) tied not by blood but by marriage law.
Basic Kinship Structure
Why These Distinctions Matter in Ancestry Work
When tracing family history, it helps to know which set of relationships you are really looking at.
DNA / genetic genealogy can only reveal your consanguineal relatives.
Historical and cultural genealogy requires us to pay attention to affinal ties as well, because they often determined how families allied, prospered, or endured.
In fact, many societies have placed equal, or even greater, emphasis on affinal connections. In South Asia, for instance, marriage rules systematically tied whole lineages together. In Europe, royal dynasties carefully managed marriage alliances to secure land and power. Ordinary families, too, used marriage to strengthen bonds between households, even if the stakes were less grand than kingdoms.
Closing Thought
By putting names to these different family types — natal, conjugal, consanguineal, affinal — we gain a clearer vocabulary for talking about the many ways people belong to one another. For those of us exploring ancestry, it means we can better explain not just who is related to us, but also how those relationships are structured, remembered, and passed down.
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