My Cousin’s Nephew’s Daughter’s Father-in-Law…

I think that there should be a limit on how far we can go to describe someone's relationship to someone else in public life. Unless you are filling out a genealogical form and are trying to describe who in your family crossed the land bridge from Asia to North America, there is no reason to describe someone as your 'mother's sister's nephew's cousin's Great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather's niece 3 times removed.

I don't know what it's like in your province or state, but here in New Brunswick I think we have a bit of an insecurity complex. We seem to need to find ways to connect ourselves to famous people in the news. The other day as I was listening to the provincial news and there was an item about how some guy somewhere got a new high profile job. 'Good for him,' I thought, 'but why is this local news?' Then came the reason why it was included on the news -- he had a vague distant relationship to someone in New Brunswick. Great on the guy. He worked hard and got a great job and is in charge of all of the Underwater Firefighters in the world or some such, but who cares who he's related to here.

The next time I heard the item I traced the relationship and it turns out this guy's great grandmother was related to the distant cousin of someone who lives here. My question becomes – Who cares? Why do we care how he might be related to someone here. He probably doesn't know where we are and couldn't care less. Are we really that hard up for news that we are now farming obscure relationships in order to fill the news broadcasts? There must be something happening somewhere that merits reporting more than this. At least I hope so. Would it have been so bad to just leave this story off the news? Even no news is better than this.