Descendants¶

I get a lot of questions about the difference between a child and a descendant, so I'll make a brief aside about the word "descendant". I apologize if this is all entirely obvious to you; it isn't obvious to everyone.

You are a child of your parents, but you are not a child of your grandparents. You are, however, a descendant of your grandparents. Similarly, you are a descendant of your great-grandparents. In the following family tree, everyone is a descendant of Gramma, but only Aunt and Mom are Gramma's children. Similarly, you and your siblings are children of your Mom and descendants of Gramma, but not Gramma's children.

Gramma
    Aunt
    Mom
        You
        Sister
        Brother

We can recursively define a "descendant" as a child or a descendant of a child. Note that this means that a child is a descendant, but not all descendants are children.