Next of kin

“ Next of Kin—Important.—The next of kin, if any such there be, of Gabriel Tittlebat Titmouse, formerly of Whitehaven, cordwainer, and who died somewhere about the year 1793, in London, may hear of something of the greatest possible importance to himself, or herself, or themselves, by immediately communicating with Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap, Solicitors, Saffron Hill. No time is to be lost. ”

“ If the court appoints a guardian, the law (1894) requires that it "shall choose the father, or his testamentary appointee; then the mother if [still] unmarried, then next of kin, giving preference to the males." ”

“ That they apply to relatives by marriage, and not to relatives by blood merely, is evident from the fact, that of the fifteen particular cases specified as "near of kin," eight are relatives by marriage, and seven relatives by blood, the first on the list being a relative by blood, the second a relative by marriage, the next six being relatives by blood, and the last seven being relatives by marriage. ”

“ She has great control of the terms on which he is accepted, and she and her kin can drive him away again, if they see fit. The children will be hers and will remain with her. The property will remain hers, while her husband must abandon his property when he comes to her. The next male friend of a woman will be her brother, not her husband, and the next male guardian of a child will be his mother's brother, not his father. Words of relationship, address, etc., must all conform to the fundamental notion which rules the family. ”

“ It is now settled that the latter method of distribution is the correct one, and it is thought that this will also apply when only great-grandchildren are alive. (4) The next of kin must be ascertained according to the rules of consanguinity, which are the same in English as in the civil law. Degree is calculated from the intestate, through the common ancestor if any, to the kindred. Thus from son to father is one degree, to grandfather two degrees, to brother two degrees, to uncle three degrees, and so on. ”

“ We are not, however, dealing with wills or settlements, but with the words 'next of kin,' as used in a statute passed in acknowledgment of losses incurred by the ancestors, under circumstances rendering conjecture futile as to what their action, if exercising a volition in the matter, might be, and where the act clearly indicates the judgment of congress that the next of kin, for the purposes of succession generally, should be the beneflciaries, as most in accord with the theory of the appropriations. ”

“ Moreover, when Congress made the widow preferred over the parents and both the widow and parents preferred over the next of kin, it barred the deferred classes from recovering by creating a preferred class which could recover. Yet if respondent's theory is adopted, the near next of kin who are not dependent are treated as a preferred class not for the purpose of allowing them to recover but to defeat a recovery by all next of kin. ”

“ If the individual is deceased we must have the written consent of the next of kin. The next of kin is defined as: unremarried widow or widower, son, daughter, father, mother, brother or sister.
If you have questions or comments regarding this response, you may contact us at 313-801-0800 or by mail at the address shown in the letterhead above. If you are a veteran, or a deceased veteran's next of kin, please consider submitting your future requests online by visiting us at: http:vetrecs.archives.gov. ”

“ The suggestion rather than contention that if the state law be held applicable to determine next of kin, the right should have been recognized to seek to trace the paternity of the illegitimate child, so as to make the asserted father the parent under the statute, might well be disposed of by saying that no such contention seems to have been urged in either of the courts below. ”

“ If a son or daughter be possessed of real and personal estate, and die unmarried, or widowed without children, and without making a will, leaving a surviving father, he would take the real estate as heir-at-law, and the personal estate as sole next of kin. ”

“ What was my clan was determined by customary law, which was not the same in all stages of society; in the earliest Semitic communities a man was of his mother’s clan, in later times he belonged to the clan of his father. But the essential idea of kinship was independent of the particular form of the law. A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. ”

“ Days, weeks and years passed heavily by as she plodded on her lonely way after her mother's death, not knowing of a single human being with whom she could claim kith or kin, and feeling like a waif on the ocean strand, waiting for another wave to bear her onward into the circle of the great human family, the only kinship she was henceforth to know. ”

“ Just as, with us, kinship and consanguinity largely coincide, so with primitive peoples are the kinship organisations immense, if one-sided, extensions of blood relationship, at all events in theory. In many parts of the world a totem kin traces its descent to a single male or female ancestor ”

“ For as long as we are divided in this respect, though a man be father, or son, or brother, or aught else, he is no true kinsman, as being cut off from that relationship which is from above. What advantageth it to be bound by the ties of earthly family, if we are not joined by those of the spiritual? what profits nearness of kin on earth, if we are to be strangers in heaven? ”

“ This will appear from the general principle that a man may not marry any who are near of kin to him. This is the general law as laid down in Lev. xviii. 6. "None of you shall approach to any "that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness. I am the "Lord." The words translated "near of kin to him," mean, as in the marginal rendering, "remainder of flesh." They include all near relatives by blood. They include also near relatives by marriage or by affinity, as it is called. ”

“ As with us, it is a sociological fact; custom, which has among them far more power than law among us, determines whether a man is of kin to his mother and her relatives alone, or to his father and father's relatives, or whether both sets of relatives are alike of kin to him. In the latter case, where parental kinship prevails, the limits of the kin are often determined by the facts of consanguinity. In the two former cases, where kinship is reckoned through males alone or through females alone, consanguinity has little or nothing to do with kinship, as will be shown more in detail below. ”

“ Duties of Near Relatives.—There are similar duties of charity and piety between other near relatives, for example, between brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren uncles and aunts and their nephews and nieces, and between first cousins. The obligation seems, to some authors, to be a grave one as far as the second degree of kinship, but is light in the other degrees. The relationship and duty to kin by marriage is not so strong. ”

“ When legal kinship comes to coincide with natural kinship the circle of the kin widens, and the organisation of society changes, so as to render less needful the strengthening of the family by adding artificially to its numbers; testamentary rights come into existence; the {419} feeling of natural kinship dominates the legal idea; and kinship by adoption ultimately vanishes. ”

“ The notion of kin was so elastic that various conceptions of procreation have been 497grafted upon it, and various ways of organizing the family, or of reckoning kinship, have been connected with it. Mores grow upon the notions of kinship. They dictate modes of behavior and ideas of right and duty, and train all members of the society in the same. The relation of father and child is known to few persons, perhaps only to two. Kinship through the father, therefore, seems to uncivilized people far less important than kinship through the mother. ”

“ And although in the most archaic period whose remains are accessible to us it does not appear that these rites meant actual admission into the kin, their analogy easily lent itself to that construction as the organisation of society into clans drew closer and closer together, and especially as the patriarchal clan developed; and marriage at length came in many cases to operate as an actual severance from one kin and an entrance into another. ”

“ There were the hysterical relatives, the wives and mothers and brothers who demanded that their kin be Awakened because they were special cases, not really guilty, or needed at home, or possessed of such awesome talents and qualities as to be exempt from the laws of lesser men. ”

“ A relation or relative is one to whom another may be related by ties of blood or by law. Thus, a brother is a relation or relative by ties of blood; and a brother-in-law is a relation or relative by law. A kinsman, as the formation of the word shows, is a “man’s kin” ”

“ If a woman's husband die, and leave her without children, let his brother marry her, and let him call the son that is born to him by his brother's name, and educate him as the heir of his inheritance, for this procedure will be for the benefit of the public, because thereby families will not fail, and the estate will continue among the kindred; and this will be for the solace of wives under their affliction, that they are to be married to the next relation of their former husbands. ”

“ As concerns the second point in question, it is apparent that the strict rule of exogamy as regards the kin leaves marriage open to those who are very near in blood; for a man is not of kin to his own children, and a man is not of kin to his brother's children. ”

“ A person who had no children or direct lineal descendants might bequeath his property at pleasure: if he died without a will, first his father, then his brother or brother's children, next his sister or sister's children succeeded: if none such existed, then the cousins by the father's side, next the cousins by the mother's side,—the male line of descent having preference over the female. ”

“ There seemed to be no doubt, however, that in connexion with marriage, a man always thought of these relatives as püliol, a term which denotes certain kin, to whatever clan they may belong. So far as I could ascertain, if a man thought of a given woman, he thought of her as one, or not one, of his püliol, and it seemed to me in several cases as if it came almost as a new idea to some of the Todas that his püliol included all the people of his own clan. ”

“ Vaitarana, doubly kinsman, sacrificer, shall milk the cow who ne'er hath calved, Sabardhu, When I encompass Varuna and Mitra with lauds, and Aryaman in safest shelter. 18. Their kin, the Prince in heaven, thy nearest kinsman, turning his thought to thee thus speaks in kindness: This is our highest bond: I am his offspring. ”

“ The male member of the family inherits, but he does so only as the son of a female member of the family through whom he may justly claim kinship, or, to put it in another form, a man's natural heir is not his son, or his brother's son, or the descendant of a common male ancestor, but his sister's, or his sister's daughter's son, or the descendant of a common female ancestress. ”

“ Although it frequently happens that the children belong to the kin which through one of the parents or otherwise exercises the supreme authority in the family, it is far from being the case that there is invariable agreement between the principles on which kinship and authority are determined. ”

“ The eighth is of a man with his kin, and the same sin is increased and lessened according as the kinship is near or far. The ninth is of the man with the 40 kin of his wife, or, on the contrary, of the wife with the kin of her husband. ”

“ In conformity with the organization of society based upon kin, when in the first stage of its development, the kindred group inherited, and the common ancestor of this kin being considered a female, it follows that if a man died, not his children, still less his wife, but his mother's descendants, that is, his brothers, sisters, in fact the entire consanguine relationship from which he derived on his mother's side, were his heirs. ”

“ When the nearest of kin are the mother and the brothers and sisters, the personal estate is divisible in equal portions, one of which will belong to the mother, and one to each of the brothers and sisters ”

“ The kinsman spoken of is the kinsman of the deceased man's father, that is next to him of his family.
3. When a Hebrew died without a son, the inheritance went, according to law, to his daughter, (v 8:) but if he had no daughter, then it went to his brethren; if he had no brethren, then to his father's brethren; and if his father had no brethren, then to his father's kinsman that is next to him of his family. It is true that the inheritance passed the nearest affinity-relations ”

“ In the classificatory system most of the kin in the same generation are grouped under one general term; e.g., all the males of the grandfather’s generation are called by one term—another term includes father, father’s brothers, father’s male cousins, mother’s sisters’ husbands, mother’s female cousins’ husbands, and so on. ”

“ The most instructive application of the doctrine that the kin is, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body, is to be found in the collective responsibility of the clan. Illustrations might be cited from every corner of the known world. ”

“ In primitive society, however, consanguinity tends to be wider than kinship by as much again. In other words, in the recognition of kinship one entire side of the family is usually left clean out of account. ”

“ Its very foundations have recently been powerfully assaulted by the adherents of a totally different view of the origin and development of the human family. How the phenomena of marriage and kinship will appear when seen in a new light, we shall next try to discover. ”