i’m sorry I had to have a computer think for me but this is what it gave me
This is a delightfully strange thought experiment, and I see exactly why you’re asking. Let’s break it down, first without kids, then with kids weaving through the chain.
- The basic chain: no kids
You’ve got a sequence like this:
· M₁ marries W₁. W₁ dies. · M₁ marries W₂ (40 years younger). M₁ dies. · W₂ marries M₂ (much younger). W₂ dies. · M₂ marries W₃ (much younger). M₂ dies. · … and so on, alternating.
Is it all one long chain of the same couple? No, it’s a relay race of spouses. Each new marriage involves a completely new person who wasn’t part of the original couple. What links them is that they “inherit” the previous widowed partner, but the couple itself is always a fresh pairing. You could call it a serial marital lineage, not a single couple.
The relationship between any two non-adjacent people in the chain is simply “my late spouse’s later spouse’s later spouse…”. There’s no standard family term for it. M₁ and M₂, for example, are co-husbands of W₂ (sequentially), but they have no legal or blood relation to each other.
- Introducing kids into the chain
Now imagine each marriage in the chain produces children. Crucially, no inbreeding — everyone marries outside the chain. For simplicity:
· M₁ + W₁ have children A (Generation 1). · W₁ dies. M₁ + W₂ have children B (half-siblings of A, sharing father M₁). · M₁ dies. W₂ + M₂ have children C (half-siblings of B, sharing mother W₂). · W₂ dies. M₂ + W₃ have children D. · and so on.
Let’s map the relationships to the first set of kids A, and then “down the chain”.
For child A (from the original couple):
· W₂ was A’s stepmother (father’s second wife). That relationship remains even after M₁’s death, though legal ties often fade without adoption. · B are A’s half-siblings (same dad). · C are A’s half-sibling’s half-siblings — no blood relation to A. They are the children of A’s former stepmother with her new husband. You could say they are A’s ex-step-siblings or step-half-siblings — no standard term, just a biographical link. · M₂ is A’s stepmother’s new husband. Not a stepfather, because he didn’t marry A’s parent. In some extended family trees he might be called a step-stepfather (jokingly). · W₃ is even more remote: stepmother’s new husband’s new wife. That’s a step-step-stepmother — purely biographical.
What about “generation down” couples?
Suppose A marries someone X, completely outside the chain. Is M₂ (W₂’s second husband) a step-parent-in-law to the couple A + X? No. A’s in-laws are X’s parents. M₂ is not A’s parent, nor X’s. The link is too tenuous: “my father’s widow’s new husband”. That might be a quirky mention at a wedding but has zero legal or customary standing.
Now suppose B (child of M₁ & W₂) marries Y. B’s mother W₂ is still alive? If W₂ is still alive when B marries, M₂ would be B’s stepfather, because W₂ married M₂ while B was a child (possibly). In that case, M₂ is a step-parent to B, and he would be the stepfather-in-law to Y. That’s a standard relationship, as long as the step-relationship formed during B’s childhood or adulthood through marriage.
So the “many times removed” couples only become step-parents or in-laws to the specific children whose parent they married. The further the chain moves from those children, the more the role evaporates into “person my ancestor’s widow later married”.
- A concrete multi-generation picture
Let’s make it visual with ages so you can see the strange generational overlaps:
· M₁ born 1900, W₁ 1900 → kid A born 1925. · W₁ dies, M₁ (now 50) marries W₂ born 1940 (40 yrs younger) → kid B born 1950. · M₁ dies, W₂ (now 30) marries M₂ born 1970 (40 yrs younger) → kid C born 1980. · W₂ dies, M₂ (now 40) marries W₃ born 2000 (40 yrs younger) → kid D born 2010.
Now:
· A is 25 years older than W₂ (her stepmother is younger than her). · B (born 1950) is 20 years older than stepfather M₂ (born 1970). · C (born 1980) is 20 years older than stepmother W₃ (born 2000).
When C marries someone Z in, say, 2010, his stepmother W₃ is only 10 years old at the wedding — a bizarre but legally valid stepmother-in-law to Z, because M₂ married W₃ while C was a child or adult. This can create intergenerational absurdities where step-parents are younger than stepchildren, but the titles stick.
- Answering your core questions directly
What is the family dynamic here? A cascading string of remarriages that creates a web of half-siblings and step-relations across wildly mismatched generations. It’s not one couple but a lineage of conjugal partnerships that “hand off” younger spouses.
Is it all one long chain of the same couple? No. It’s a chain of different couples, each linked by one common member with the previous couple.
What if we start a generation removed? Are the many-times-removed couples step-parents or step-in-laws to the generation-down couples? It depends which “generation-down” couple you mean:
· For the children whose actual parent is in the later link of the chain, yes — the spouse of that parent is a step-parent, and thus an in-law to those children’s spouses. · For children further up the chain (e.g., A’s children, grandchildren of M₁), the later spouses are at most step-step-grandparents — a descriptive curiosity with no real familial weight. · The chain dissolves into “my ancestor’s widow’s later spouse’s later spouse” which no culture formalises.
In short: you’ve invented a marriage matryoshka where each generation’s step-relations nest inside the next, but the titles dilute quickly. Delightfully, it remains entirely legal and non-incestuous as long as no one marries a blood relative.
Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
If your parent dies and your step parent remarries there isn’t a familial line involved in my experience. Like their new partner doesn’t become your quarter parent.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 6 days ago
It’s a shame so many people don’t want to raise their quarter children. Deadbeats.
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
*quarter deadbeats
rethnor@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
If each new pair had a child, you’d have a long chain of siblings. Eventually a child would have a sibling older than their parents.