In the 1860s Lewis Henry Morgan posted a questionnaire around the world — to missionaries, consuls and traders — asking one deceptively small thing: what do you call each of your relatives? Working closely with Ely S. Parker (Hasanoanda), a Seneca statesman who opened Haudenosaunee kinship to him, Morgan gathered scores of replies and published them as Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). The astonishing finding was that the answers did not vary endlessly. They fell into a handful of patterns, repeated on continents that had never met. George Peter Murdock later named six of them. The chart below never changes — the same people, the same lines, the same EGO. Change the system and watch the words redraw the family.
One family, six vocabularies
Six systems, one familychoose a terminology to begin