Family connections

• Siblings – brothers or sisters
• Immediate family – generally considered to be siblings, parents and children. However, some people also include grandparents in this list
• Extended family – people with a connection to you within the family tree (aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews etc).

Types of family

• A nuclear family – a couple and their children (considered to be the ‘average’ family structure). Statistically, a ‘nuclear family’ typically consists of 2 parents and 2.2 children.
• A matriarchal family – (can also be used to describe a society) – where the mother/female is considered to be the most important person
• A patriarchal family (can also be used to describe a society) – where the father/male is considered to be the most important person
• Single parent family – where the child/children has only a mother or father
• Same-sex parents – these are parents who are either both male (gay) or female (lesbian).

Connecting families and people

• Genealogy – studying the family history back into the past, often by hundreds and even thousands of years, to see where someone’s bloodline originally came from
• Family tree – a diagram that represents all the members of a family
• Lineage – the sequence of people before you (father > grandfather > great grandfather and so on).