In search of second cousins on my mother's side

I've decided to take a break from reporting on David Ritchie Sr's mental illness in order to post a couple of updates on my search for DNA relatives. According to 23andMe, we each have about 250 first and second cousins, which I find amazing and hard to believe. my own family is really small, with just 2 cousins on my mother's side and 2 on my father's side. How can it be that this number could multiply so quickly?

Let's look at definitions. A first cousin is someone who shares a set of grandparents with you. He or she is the child of one of your parent's siblings. In my case, my mother's sister had 2 children who are my first cousins on my mother's side, and my father's sister had 2 children who are my first cousins on my father's side. Neither my mother nor my father had a brother, so that's it.

A second cousin, by definition, is someone who shares a set of great-grandparents with you. he or she is the child of one of your parents' first cousins. At this point, i find myself rather stumped. i don't know any of my parents' first cousins. Why? It never even occurred to me to ask about it while my parents were alive. Now that I am looking into my family's history, it strikes me as rather puzzling and worth investigating.

I'll focus today on my mother's side. Her parents, Dave and Sandy Ritchie, were both only children. At least, that's the story. Grandma definitely didn't have siblings. Grandad always claimed that he had no brothers or sisters but that's not completely true. i have a census record where his mother Maude states that she gave birth to 2 children, one of whom is living and one of whom died. Then there is the fact that Grandad appears on the 1911 census as the "son" of Emily and William Smith. Did they formally adopt him? I don't think so, as it is Maude, not Emily, who is pictured in photographs of my grandfather and my aunt as a baby. Yet they must have thought of him as part of their family to have called him a son on the census.

To give some background, Emily was Maude's elder sister. Emily and William were looking after Grandad because his father, my great-grandfather, had been committed to an asylum a couple of years earlier. Their children would have been like brothers and sisters to my grandfather while he was at school. That being the case, it follows that the Smiths' grandchildren should have been like my mother's cousins. And, taking the argument to its logical conclusion, the children of those grandchildren should be like my second cousins, if not by blood then by virtue of descending from a common childhood home.

As far as locating these people is concerned, I'm making slow progress. I've managed to establish that the Smiths had 5 of their own children, all of whom were born in Marylebone. They are, in order of birth, LS Smith [a girl] born in 1892, FE Smith [a boy] born in 1893, Alice M Smith born in 1899, Ivy Smith [a boy] born in 1902, and Richard William Smith born in 1904. Now the challenge is to track their spouses and children, and those children's spouses and children, until I eventually find descendants of Emily and William who belong to my own generation.

Granted, these descendants wouldn't actually be my second cousins, but so what? I'm going to be painfully short of second cousins if i don't count them. Besides, they are still my relatives on the Parker side. If they don't have old photos and stories about my great-grandfather's childhood, I can still ask them if they are interested in taking a DNA test and locating second cousins of their own.

Photo credit: "Ascending the Stairs" by Thad Zajdowicz.