Definition
A great-great-grandfather's sister. A term of Roman civil law used to describe a specific degree of collateral kinship in the ascending line of a family. The term appears in historical legal writing as a designation within the elaborate taxonomy of blood relations that civil law developed for purposes of succession and inheritance.
Note: Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary identify *abavita* as a misprint or scribal corruption of *abamita*, which is the correct form of this term. The two words refer to the same relationship. Researchers encountering *abavita* in source texts should treat it as an error and consult *abamita* for substantive content.
Common Confusion
ABAVITA / ABAMITA: These are not two terms for two relationships. *Abavita* is a corrupt rendering of *abamita*, and both refer to a great-great-grandfather's sister. The confusion is purely textual — a reader encountering *abavita* in an older source has found a misprint, not a different degree of kinship. See ABAMITA for the substantive entry.
Why It Matters in Research
This term exists in the Law Mind corpus primarily as a bibliographic artifact rather than a working legal concept. Its research significance lies almost entirely in the textual history: the term appears in Bracton (*De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae*, fol. 68b) as a copyist or printing error for *abamita*, and the historical dictionaries preserve it only to flag that error. Researchers working with medieval common law sources or early printed editions of Bracton may encounter *abavita* and need to know that it is not a distinct legal relationship — it is the same degree of kinship as *abamita*, mislabeled.
For succession research, the operative term is always *abamita*. Looking up *abavita* in older finding aids, indexes, or treatises will typically route the researcher back to *abamita* by cross-reference, as all three source dictionaries do here. Do not build a research chain on *abavita* as an independent entry; follow the redirect.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in agreement: *abavita* is not a genuine variant but a corrupt form of *abamita*. Black's (1st ed.) and Black's (2nd ed.) both cite Bracton's folio 68b as the locus of the error and both cite Burrill's *Law Dictionary* as the authority identifying it as a misprint. Bouvier's adds nothing beyond the redirect, offering no independent analysis. The consistency across dictionaries on this point is itself informative — none of the compilers treated *abavita* as worthy of substantive definition, suggesting the error was widely recognized among legal lexicographers by the mid-to-late nineteenth century. No historical source defends *abavita* as a correct or alternative form.