Anyone else with a completely mixed‑up family tree?

[WittyRubyPanda]

Hi all. I’ve realised recently that my family tree is so tangled that even explaining it feels like doing a puzzle. For example, two of my mum’s uncles are actually younger than she is. Younger uncles! And their children — who technically count as a generation above me — are younger than I am too. One of them was born while I was revising for my final exams.
It always makes me laugh how impossible it is to keep the “right” generational order when real life does its own thing.
So I’m genuinely curious:
Does anyone here have this kind of mixed‑up generational situation in their own family? Or do you know anyone who does?
Younger uncles or aunts? Cousins who should be older but aren’t? Relatives who belong to a “higher” generation but go to nursery?
Would love to hear your stories — the stranger, the better!

It doesn't feel mixed up to me... it feels normal.
My first cousins were born 1949-2000.
My mom's parents were the same ages as my dad's grandparents.

My dad's family tree is especially well documented. Back in the 1600-1700s there was a lot of weaving, 2nd cousins marrying each other etc. Normal in small communities then, too.

I really do wonder what the fall out was when Denise found out that Barbara was actually her aunt and not her sister? And the people she knew as her parents were actually her grandparents?

In my grandad's family there was an example of this. In their set up it was known by all of the kids, but kept discreet outside the house, what the truth was. The child ended up close to both the siblings she was brought up with and her siblings when her mother had more children much later. She also had a lovely, close relationship with her grandparents.

In my Nana's family it caused huge bad feeling. The child didn't find out that her Mum was actually her Gran until her mum was dying. The people she'd been brought up believing were her siblings then iced her out of their mother's funeral on the basis that she was "only" a grandchild. She lost her whole family in one horrible swoop.

I totally get that — once the generations overlap like that, keeping track of who’s who becomes its own little puzzle. But it’s lovely how the connections still feel completely like family, even when the labels get confusing!

That’s such a fascinating bit of family history — those long age gaps really did create situations where roles and generations got completely rearranged. I can only imagine how confusing (and emotional) it must have been for Denise once everything came to light.

It’s really interesting how what feels “normal” varies so much from family to family. Those huge spreads of birth years and the small‑community cousin marriages definitely show how flexible family trees can be across generations.

My mum is 75. Her cousin is my age - 48. I remember growing up with him as if he was my cousin not my mum’s. My nanna though was one of about 8 children with some big gaps in age so it was inevitable that the eldest might be starting to have children when the younger siblings were being born - days before contraception likely!!

I also recall when I first started teaching and had been with my future husband for a few years, one of the boys in my class was really good friends with my partner’s cousin. Again, another big family. My now ex’s dad is one of 7/8 (can’t quite recall) so whilst some of the cousins were finished with school and well into working life there were also more cousins appearing on the scene.

My immediate side of the family is quite small on both my parents so less complication. I have 4 cousins. My children have 1 cousin on my side and 2 cousins on dad’s side. Th wit dad has more cousins than I can actually remember!! lol.

t’s amazing how those big age gaps in large families can shift everything around like that. I completely get what you mean about growing up alongside a relative who technically belongs to an older generation — it really does make the “official” labels feel secondary to the actual relationship. And your story about teaching and suddenly realising pupils are connected to your partner’s huge extended family made me smile. It’s such a contrast to small families where all the generations line up neatly!

To be frank, I'm not too sure which of those things happened in the case of Denise.

A couple of years ago, I spoke with a relative who was born a year after Denise and knew both Barbara and Denise while they were all at school.

He believed that they were sisters and was totally astounded when I mentioned to him that that Barbara was actually the aunt of Denise rather than her sister.

So, it certainly didn't go outside of the immediate family.

There's another thread on here at the moment about going down a black hole when you notice something about your ancestors:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/genealogy/5448850-what-made-you-fall-into-a-black-hole-when-finding-out-about-your-ancestors

Please ignore all of the below unless you have an interest in the history of Gloucester schools! It was a black hole that I fell down.

This relative mentioned the two secondary schools that Barbara and Denise went to. This was back in the late 1950s/ early 1960s. Back then there were grammar schools, secondary moderns and a very small number of secondary technical schools.

Secondary technical schools were supposed to teach technical skills, similar to being an apprentice. They largely died out but some elements did carry on.

I went to an ex-secondary modern and we were the first cohort not to take the 11 plus in our county and the first to go to a comprehensive school.

The school was in a very mixed area in what was then a "New Town" (although it was always a city). It was set up very much to offer practical skills as much as academic skills. There were classrooms full of typewriters, ovens for cookery, lathes and drills for woodwork and metalwork and even, I remember, pouring molten metal into sand casts.

Certainly, everybody was required to do metalwork and woodwork; cookery and needlework in the first to third years (year 7 to 9 nowadays). However, my attempts at both a wooden aeroplane and a stuffed soft toy were equally terrible.

In later years there was the option of also doing typing and technical drawing.

Denise attended one of these schools, the Girls' Central School, Derby Road, Gloucester. In 1974 it was reorganised as a grammar school, and renamed Colwell School for Girls. The school closed in 1988.
.

Barbara attended a secondary modern named the Winifred Cullis Girls School that opened in 1957. It was named for Professor Winifred Cullis CBE who had died the year before.

This is where I ended up going down a black hole.

Winifred Cullis (1875-1956) seems to have been a quite exceptional woman. She was the first ever woman professor at a medical school and only the second ever woman professor in the UK.

Born in Gloucester in 1875, she got a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge in 1896 where she studied Natural Sciences.

She took her exams in 1899 and 1900. Although, back then, Cambridge did not award degrees to women. So Winifred had a certificate from Newnham rather than a degree from Cambridge.

Winifred then began her scientific career in 1901, as an assistant in the research laboratory of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians.

Later that year she became a demonstrator in physiology at the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW), the first woman to hold such a post. The LSMW was closely associated with the Royal Free Hospital.

She remained at the LSMW/Royal Free for most of her working life, working as co-lecturer, lecturer, reader, and (from 1919) professor; she was the second woman in Britain to be made a professor, and the first to achieve this position in a medical school (the first was Edith Morley, made Professor of English at Reading in 1908).

In 1915, she became one of the first women to be elected to the Physiological Society. She wrote talks for the BBC Schools Programme, and her 1949 school textbook, Your Body and the Way it Works, was the first to discuss growth, reproduction, and heredity.

She also travelled widely. In 1917 she was acting professor of physiology at the University of Toronto and in 1918 gave a memorial lecture at Vassar College. She also delivered lectures on physiology and health to troops in Gibraltar and Malta after World War One, and in China, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, and the Middle East during World War Two.

She was head of the women's section of the British Information Services to the United States from 1941 to 1943 and then travelled throughout the Middle East in 1944-45. She travelled over 10,000 miles in her late 60s during the war years giving lectures.

Winifred died suddenly on 13 November 1956 at the age of 81.

There is a blue plaque commemorating her life on a building that was formerly part of the Royal Free Hospital.

The photo was taken when she was 65, the portrait was from when she was 64.

I don't really know what it says about me, but when I was tracing an unusual aunt/niece realtionship I totally got distracted by this name and fell down a black hole of finding out who she was.

So was your half brother a great uncle before he was even born?

Yes. It’s crazy!

My DNA test has thrown up a relative I didn’t know on my mums side. I messaged him and his dad was adopted and never found his birth parents
from the DNA match it looks like it was my gran or my grans sister that gave birth to his dad and gave him up as a baby

siblings marrying siblings

What??!

I was in a class at primary school with a boy I was distantly related to. My grandad was his great-grandad's brother (or the other way round, I can't remember). So although we were the same age, our grandparents were different generations.

I know of an uncle/niece who are a day apart.

It's interesting!

Think it means two siblings marrying another two siblings. I hope!
It' s a scenario that leads to some seriously messed up match predictions on DNA sites though - any children are 'double first cousins' and share about 25% of DNA unlike ordinary first cousins who share about 10-12%.

In my great grandparents generation there are brothers who have the same name. The first one (the oldest child in the family) had died by the time the youngest was born and named in honour of the brother he'd never met.

It's not that unusual.

My SD partner was older than her. Their child is about 20 yrs younger than her siblings and she's younger than her own niece.

ETA I've just remembered that my great-granny's youngest child was the same age as my granny's eldest. i.e. My great-uncle and my eldest aunt were the same age.

Well I’m not 100% sure which of two brothers is my grandad and sadly Granny’s not alive to tell us who she shagged behind her husband’s back during the 1940s. DNA matches to “half cousins” give me a very good idea which brother it is but these dna matches deny it all and think we’re not that closely related and that my grandad must be their grandads brother rather than us having the same grandfather. It’s a bit messed up!

Yes, me. My mother and her mother were pregnant at the same time, twice, so my uncle is the same age as me (and younger than my brother). My gran started producing dc at 17 and had 11, she was still younger as a grandmother than I was when I became a mother.

Meanwhile my grandad went on merrily producing children round the world. I have an aunt who is 7 years younger than me on his side. Confusingly, she looks very like my mum.

Also my brother is married to my best friend's childhood friend. His best friend is the son of my mum's current partner. And he, the best friend, is partner of my SIL's ex flatmate.

I mean, we live in London. There are other people around. Yet we behave like we are in 18th century rural isolation and can only mate with distant cousins.

It’s amazing how easily an aunt–niece relationship can be mistaken for siblings when the ages are so close. I can see why people who knew Barbara and Denise at school never questioned it — sometimes the family dynamics only make sense from the inside.
And your black‑hole detour was genuinely fascinating. It’s incredible how a simple question about two relatives can lead straight into the history of local schools and then to someone as remarkable as Winifred Cullis. These unexpected discoveries are one of the best parts of tracing family stories — you start with one puzzle and end up uncovering an entire hidden world.

Funnily enough, my maternal great‑grandmother was the sister of someone’s grandfather who is actually around thirty years younger than me. Every time I try to map it out, the generations zig‑zag all over the place. It really shows how families don’t always follow the neat, tidy lines we expect. These overlaps make the family tree look chaotic on paper, but they also make the stories much more interesting!

Funnily enough, my maternal great‑grandmother was the sister of someone’s grandfather who is actually around thirty years younger than me. Every time I try to map it out, the generations zig‑zag all over the place. It really shows how families don’t always follow the neat, tidy lines we expect. These overlaps make the family tree look chaotic on paper, but they also make the stories much more interesting!

That must have been a huge thing to discover. DNA tests really do open doors none of us expect, especially when previous generations kept things private or felt they had no other options. It’s very possible your gran or her sister did what they thought was best at the time, even if it leaves big questions now.
Finding a new relative like that can feel emotional from both sides, but it’s also a chance for someone to finally have answers they never had growing up. I hope the conversations go gently for everyone involved — these surprises can be complicated but also quite meaningful.

That’s actually really touching in a bittersweet way. It must have been such a mix of grief and love for the family to give the youngest the name of the brother he never got to meet. It also shows how differently names were handled back then compared with now — honouring someone so directly was much more common. Little details like this really add so much depth to a family’s history.

Once you get far enough back (to when mothers tended to have 6-10 live births) it was pretty usual for the oldest daughter to start her family at around the same time as her Mum was completing hers, so most people probably have situations where an aunt or uncle was younger than their nephew or niece (and might have lived in the same town or attended the same school) in their tree.

That’s such an interesting mix of ages in your family. A child being younger than their own niece, and then a great‑uncle the same age as your eldest aunt — it really shows how easily the generations can overlap depending on circumstances. Family timelines don’t always follow neat lines, and stories like yours make that really clear.