It is fascinating how people grow up with such varying connections with their extended family. Even growing up I would only see my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and first cousins once or twice a year at major holidays.
Most years there would be a nearby annual family reunion of my mother’s mother’s parents’ lineage. I remember it mostly as a lot of older people I didn’t know, and none of them lived near me (the venue was a 2-3 hour drive from where I grew up, and I don’t know how far other people drove.)
But in my high school class there were definitely lots of people who seemed to be cousins with each other, and had massive family reunions in town. In high school my friends always joked about these extended family events as a hassle, but part of me thinks that perhaps I missed out on something there.
It’s interesting to think about the factors that influence a child’s experience with extended family. I grew up only two hours from where my mother grew up, while my father had moved quite far before meeting my mother. My mother had two siblings and my father had one, which is perhaps on the low side for America in that time (my parents were born in the 1950s).
Another interesting thing is that I have never met anyone outside my immediate family with my last name. My father only had one sister, who was married, so those cousins have a different last name. My father’s father died young (long before my parents met), and my grandmother remarried, so she had a different surname for my entire life.
I grew up in a very small town in a rural area, and I would have expected this to be the sort of place to be where people don’t move far from home and where extended families stay close together. But even my extended family in the same US state (but a couple hours’ drive away) was never super close to me. I barely escaped high school before social media went mainstream, so I wonder if I would have forged closer relationships with my extended family with the help of social media.