Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn’t that a far more wonderful thought than any myth?

All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin: the hierarchies of seraphs in the uttermost skies; the thrones and principalities in the zodiac; the shades that roam throughout space; the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all, brothers in essence — oh, be we then brothers indeed! All things form but one whole.

We’re all cousins.
Everybody on Earth, no matter how far apart, has a surprisingly recent common ancestor.
Go meet your family in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas, and in Europe.
Understand that there is no “them”.
It’s just “us”.
Feel those connections.

As Scots our Celtic heritage ties us closely together. It binds us with our cousins in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic and Wales. And with other Europeans lucky to blessed with good weather. We have Celtic cousins in Brittany, Galicia and Cornwall. Our is a heritage shared in a love of music and song, of poetry - and a special affinity with the sea and with nature.

Almost in every kingdom the most ancient families have been at first princes' bastards.

In eleventh-century Europe, kingdoms, like other landed estates, were family firms and, as in modern family businesses, there was no fixed order of succession. At any time a struggle for control could pit brother against brother, nephew against uncle or, as here, son against father. Victory brought massive rewards. We know from Domesday Book (1086) that the winner in this game of thrones got no less than 20 per cent of all the land in England.

I do not believe that the loyalty of those many who over those 270 years, and particularly in this century, worked together and died together as part of the union under the Crown, was to the Crown quite simply, even though they wore the Crown on their uniforms and many of them wore it on their hearts. They were not the mercenaries of a Habsburg empire bound together by personal union and dynastic marriages; they were not the servants of a Hohenzollern empire imposed by military force. It was the Crown of the United Kingdom in parliament which was the centre of loyalty, as it is the essential unifying element of this realm, in the name of which and under the inspiration of which men and women these 270 years have worked and lived and died together.

Some say “blood is thicker than water,” as if only your immediate relatives have blood.
But everyone has blood, and you’re related to all of them.

My cousin Zygmunt found a distant relative in Italy, Professor Vettolani, who works as an astrophysicist in Bologna. When we contacted him, it turned out that our family traditions are quite compatible. So I think we are really connected by Etruscan blood. Although Zygmunt, who is a tireless researcher of family history, has several other theories about our origins. It turns out that in Italy there were two, no longer existing, settlements called Vetulani: one in Lazio, and the other in Tuscany, near Pisa.

Nos plus cruels ennemis sont nos proches... Les rois n'ont ni frères, ni fils, ni mère.

Everyone was somebody’s cousin, or uncle, or bedmate, or best college friend. Sometimes he felt that the whole of Washington was glued together into one vast, incestuous, and inefficient snotball.

Quoting geneticists, Guy Murcia says we’re all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is further removed than your fiftieth cousin. Murcia also describes out kinship though an analysis of how deeply we share the air. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and-owing to the wind’s ceaseless circulation- over a year’s time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as everyone who ever lived. (The Seven Mysteries of Life)

Of which all Europe rings from side to side.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.