I am more or less estranged from my family. I have never got on with my younger sister and we have on-off periods of not speaking lasting years (we are currently in an off period), so I am not close to her children either. I also have another older sister who I have not spoken to for the past 13 years because of something that she did to me, which also meant loss of contact with her two children.
I am in sporadic text contact with one of my two brothers, and speak to my eldest sister on the phone occasionally, less so since my younger sister and I stopped communicating in 2010 and she started demanding more of my eldest sister's time and attention, taking her on holiday with her, going to hers for Christmas dinner, etc. I also have one cousin with whom I am in regular contact who, similar to my situation became estranged from the wider family as a result of a disagreement with my two sisters, that could have been resolved if the other people involved were prepared to listen and acknowledge they had caused hurt feelings (ironically these were the same two sisters with whom I don't get on).
There is nothing in these fallings out that could not be resolved in a "normal" family. Sadly within our family there is an inability to deal with simple conflicts, as long as no one disagrees with one anyone, they all basically live under the illusion that they are a close family. The two sisters in particular have very "my way or the highway" judgemental attitudes which I find hard to get my head around, and after years of frustration, 13 years ago, when the older of those two sisters let me down in a crisis, I just got fed up with putting up with them and being the smiley happy go lucky slightly scatty one and went off and did my own thing.
I got married, left our home town, had a child, now aged 10, and now live very happily here, albeit in splendid isolation from close family members. Sometimes I wish I had a lovely close family, especially around special occasions. Sadly, DH has a similar family set up to mine and is also estranged from his family. So it is just us, over here on our own with the friends we have made here, friends we still visit in our home town, and my cousin mainly. (We are very nice people by the way - we are just unlucky to have horrible families .... honest 
)
I have nieces and nephews, some of whom I used to be very close to close to when they were young kids, and who themselves are now having babies, but since we left our home town 12 years ago I rarely see them. My younger sister sucks up to them in such a gushy and over the top way and has kind of taken them over. Plus, with the distance and their possible discomfort about the "rift", I hardly see them. We don't call or keep in contact, especially since I deleted my Facebook account, three years ago.
The family itself is not that close, apart from Facebook "contact" and the odd ME fest aka "family gatherings" held at my younger sisters, to which myself nor my cousin are no longer invited. My younger sister is very narcissistic, attention seeking and demanding - for example deliberately excluding family members she has fallen out with from her family gatherings, then boasting on Facebook about "how lucky I am to have a close and loving family" and what a lovely time they all had. That's why I got rid of my Facebook account in 2010, I got fed up with her petty hypocritical comments on other family members timelines.
I hear snippets about family goings on from my eldest sister but I feel no connection to the family any more. But I sometimes feel I would still like my son to know his cousins. I had my son in my late 30's. He is an only child. His first cousin's are in their 20's and 30's and some now have children of their own.
In order to get manage a business page, I had to start another normal Facebook account. I had said i was going to keep this purely for networking with good friends and not family members in order to avoid my sister's snide-y comments. However I feel I would like to re-connect with some of the nieces and nephews. But I know that as soon as my sister sees I have friended them the digs will start again.
Should I just leave it and find another way - although FB is the main way they seem to keep in touch. Or should I just accept that these people are lost to me and forget about the whole thing, and hope my son (who is very bright, popular and confident), gets his own big circle of good friends and family when he grows up? Put into perspective, I have a very large family abroad that I know of but we are not part of each others lives.