the Vale has a population of about 13,000 people . most of them live in scattered farms , hamlets and villages . there are also two small market towns in the area , each with about 1,500 inhabitants . most of my detailed enquiries have been carried out in one of these towns and in three adjoining rural parishes , in one of which I live with my family . a certain number of my informants live in other parts of the area . in addition , a private census of the whole Vale population , carried out in 1960 , has provided a good deal of basic information about each individual inhabitant and the composition of each household . although a rural and predominantly agricultural area , no part of the Vale is more than 12 miles from major industrial and urban centres . many of the people who live in the Vale work outside it and travel to and fro each day to earn their livings in adjacent urban areas . most Vale people also have kin ties with people who live in these areas and in other parts of south Wales with whom they maintain effective social relations . a larger number of Vale people who do not work in the urban areas nevertheless visit them fairly regularly to see friends and relatives who live there or who are in hospital there , to shop or go to the cinema , and for such recreational purposes as to attend football matches and greyhound races . about 40 per cent of the adult population of the Vale consists of people who were born outside it and have lived in it for less than 15 years . the majority of such comparative newcomers were born in other parts of south Wales , mostly in places in the counties of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire which lie within 25 miles of the borders of the Vale . many of them have close relatives still living at their places of birth or previous residence with whom they maintain frequent and intimate contact . the most important sources of employment for those Vale people who earn their livings within its borders are agriculture and forestry , stone quarries and cement works , and the building industry . a large number of men and women are employed in different capacities by public bodies such as the county and rural district councils , the fire service , and local electricity and water undertakings . there is also a large royal air force station in the Vale which provides employment for a number of locally resident civilians . further sources of employment are public and private transport and communication services , the distributive trades , and a number of small industrial concerns in the two Vale market towns , among which are an asbestos factory , a printing works and three firms of agricultural engineers . 2 . most of the material concerning kinship in the Vale was obtained by standard anthropological procedures : the collection of genealogies , unstructured interviews with individual informants , and participant observation . certain data on particular aspects of kinship behaviour were provided in the course of a study of the attitudes to mental disorder of the relatives of psychiatric patients . I have also had access to a wealth of documentary material , most of it unpublished . after a time , however , I found myself able to make increasing use of direct observation to supplement verbal information . participation in the life of the locality and growing familiarity with the details of kinship connections made it possible to observe social relations between kin taking place in a wide variety of contexts and to compare behaviour between kin with behaviour between non-kin in similar situations . in collecting material from informants I have tried as far as possible to relate statements regarding kin ties to the individuals concerned rather than to married couples , elementary families or households . in the field situation this is not , of course , as easy as it sounds . data on kinship are often obtained from two or more informants simultaneously . the discussions and arguments between them which such inquiries tend to provoke often compensate for the resultant difficulty in comparing knowledge of kin and quality of relationship with them revealed by individual members of the same domestic unit . this emphasis on the kinship universe of the individual rather than the domestic unit arose from certain apparent differences between men and women , between spouses , and between parents and children in degree of recognition of extra-familial kin ties and in their functions in various contexts . I have also attempted to collect material on the interconnectedness of kin ties by interviewing and observing different members of the kinship universe of individual informants . the difficulties of doing so seem often to be directly related to the degree to which an individual &apos;s kinship network is what Bott describes as close-knit , in which there are many relationships , independent of the individual concerned , among the component units of his kin universe . in many families there is generally at least one person who is acknowledged by most other family members to be the expert on genealogical connections . the existence of such recognized experts is particularly common among families long settled in the area , other members of which tend to rely on them for details of genealogical connections and to refer the investigator to them when approached for kinship information . Firth refers to such experts as pivotal kin , relatives who act as linking points in the kinship structure and who hold more threads of genealogical connections in their heads than anyone else . I prefer to differentiate between experts and pivotal kin , and to reserve the latter term for those individuals who act as connecting relatives , irrespective of whether they are also experts . the significance of pivotal kin as connecting links is usually greater if they are also experts , as is often the case . but many pivotal kin are elderly men who , in general , know less about kinship connections than their daughters or nieces ; and it is often found that individuals remain pivotal kin after their death . not only do their graves sometimes form the pivot round which kin ties tenuously revolve , but the dead are often used by living informants as foci from which genealogical connections stem . this is particularly the case when the dead person lived to a great age or had high prestige for some reason among his kindred or in the locality . most pivotal kin who are also experts are elderly women who , from their personal knowledge of dead kin of previous generations , maintain links of information and social contact between their own and their siblings &apos; descendants and the descendants of their parents &apos; and grandparents &apos; siblings . in theory , and often in practice , this means that such women carry in their heads kinship knowledge of six generations depth and extending laterally among consanguineal kin as far as the grandchildren of second cousins . when economic and other social factors reinforce relatively remote kinship connections , the lateral extension among consanguineal kin may go further : the grandchildren of pivotal kin may recognize as cousins of unspecified degree the descendants of the pivotal kin &apos;s second or third cousins . the same factors often lead to knowledge of , and contact with , affines being very extensive . there are many individuals in the Vale who are able to identify between 200 and 500 living and dead relatives , about the majority of whom they can provide at least such information as sex , marital state , place of residence and occupation . most of these individuals are people long settled in the area , by which I mean people who , in the main , were born in the Vale and one or both of whose parents , and often whose grandparents , were also born there . by contrast , there are other individuals who show a very much more restricted range of kin recognition of the order of about 50 relatives in all . some of these individuals have always lived in the area but most of them are relatively recent immigrants , that is , adults who were born outside the Vale , often in urban areas , and who have only moved into the locality since 1945 . in both instances , in spite of the great differences in size of the average kinship universe , it is rare for the depth of generations over which kin are recognized to exceed seven or to be less than four . again , while the number of kin with whom an individual may have some kind of periodic contact tends to vary with the size of the kinship universe , the number of kin with whom an individual has frequent and intimate contact is usually little different for those with large kinship networks from those with small . degree of physical mobility is only one of a number of interdependent social factors which act directly or indirectly to influence the size of an individual &apos;s kinship universe . these factors are also related to the amount of contact the individual has with his extra-familial kin and to the differentiations he makes among them ; the most important are occupation , economic resources , ownership of property and degree of social mobility . in some cases religious affiliations and level of education also seem significant . the decisions which an individual makes in choosing how far to observe or disregard in any particular set of circumstances the sentiments , obligations and expectations which are involved in the recognition of extra-familial kin ties appear to be influenced by the interplay of such factors as these . it is within the framework provided by them that idiosyncratic preferences operate . the same factors also tend to affect the degree to which marriages reinforce already existing ties of kinship and affinity and , among certain sections of the population , the scarcely less significant ties between kith , that is , between friends and neighbours of approximately the same perceived social status . indeed , kith may be described as consisting of those who are an individual &apos;s potential affines . the multiplicity of roles which every individual fills both successively in his lifetime and simultaneously at any given time is a sociological truism which needs no labouring . in any attempt to study the functions of kinship in a highly complex society it is nevertheless all too easy to lose sight of the importance for social behaviour of role-relationships other than those based on kin ties . any analysis of a system of social relations necessarily involves the overemphasis , for heuristic purposes , of lines of demarcation between particular aspects of behaviour . in fact it is often very difficult for the observer to disentangle the kinship network of an individual from the wider social network of which it forms a part . this is most clearly seen in the case of farmers and their families who , together with those whose occupations are largely dependent on agriculture and who come , in many cases , of local farming stock , form one of the significant sections of Vale society . at the same time it is possible to demonstrate the importance of the social factors mentioned earlier in relation to the structure and functions of extra-familial kin ties . among farmers the degree of physical mobility is relatively low . although most farmers in the Vale are tenants , holdings relatively rarely become vacant other than through the death or retirement of the tenant , when it is the traditional policy among landowners and their agents to give preference among applicants for the new tenancy to the sons of the previous tenant . the vast majority of farmers are the sons and grandsons of farmers and most farmers &apos; wives are the daughters of farmers . those children of farmers who are socially mobile tend to maintain close links with their relatives who are still farming . there is a high degree of interconnectedness in the kinship and social networks of farmers ; there is also considerable variation between individual farmers in the recognition of extra-familial kin ties , according to the age of the individuals concerned , the stage of development in its life-cycle reached by the elementary family to which they belong and the social context of contacts between them . the result is that it is often almost impossible to know whether social relations between individuals in particular instances should be classified as taking place between kin or between non-kin . 