My Own

There is a peculiar way of referring to your relatives and I don’t know if it’s heard and said only in rural Kentucky, amongst my parents’ generation or if it’s more widespread and across many generations. I know it’s the first time I heard it.

I was talking to my father about the family who lives where my grandparents used to live.

“They’re your mother’s second cousins, or as your mother says, not her own.”

“Not her own what?”

Dad explained to me that it was common, where my mother grew up, to refer to your first cousins as “my own cousin” or simply “my own”. Interesting huh? Well, at least I thought so.

So here’s to you and yours... and your own.