Definition
Kindred means relatives connected by blood — that is, persons related to one another through consanguinity rather than through marriage or legal adoption. In the law of intestate succession, wills, and descent, the term identifies the class of persons eligible to take property when a decedent dies without a valid will or when a testamentary gift is made to "kindred" as a class.
The core legal meaning is narrower than ordinary usage: kindred is blood relationship only, and courts have generally excluded relatives by marriage (affines) from the term's legal scope unless a statute or instrument expressly enlarges it. The question of whether adopted children or their descendants fall within "kindred" has generated significant litigation, and the answer has varied by jurisdiction and by era.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Distant and close relatives, collectively; blood relationship; also affinity or likeness, and more broadly, persons of the same ethnic or cultural descent.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Relationship by birth or marriage; consanguinity; affinity; kin." Also "relatives by blood or marriage, more properly the former."
Even Webster's 1913 acknowledged that common usage sometimes extended kindred to include marriage relations. The legal meaning resists that extension: courts interpreting the word in statutes of descent and in wills have consistently held that the legal term means blood relations only, treating the reference to marriage in ordinary usage as imprecise. Researchers should not assume that a testator's or drafter's colloquial use of "kindred" carries the same breadth as its legal application, or vice versa.
Common Confusion
Kindred is sometimes used interchangeably with kin, relations, and consanguinity, but each term carries distinct freight in legal contexts. Consanguinity is the formal technical term for blood relationship and is the more precise word in legal analysis; kindred functions more as a collective noun identifying the persons who stand in that relationship. Relations and relatives are broader in common speech and in some statutes, and may include in-laws. In intestacy law, the distinction matters because a gift or share to "kindred" will typically exclude a surviving spouse, step-relations, and in-laws, whereas "family" or "relations" might encompass them depending on context.
Why It Matters in Research
The central research trap with kindred is its statutory meaning problem. When kindred appears in an old statute of descents or a will, its scope depended on whether the enacting legislature or testator intended the strict blood-only sense or the looser popular sense. Courts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spent considerable effort on exactly this question, and the case outcomes are jurisdiction-specific and fact-specific.
Three issues recur in historical sources and deserve attention:
First, whole blood versus half blood. The traditional rule, preserved in Kent and in all the major historical dictionaries, preferred kindred of the whole blood over kindred of the half blood in intestate succession. This distinction drove significant litigation under older descent statutes and may affect how you read historical case law about a specific decedent's estate.
Second, adoption. Bouvier flags the tension directly: in some jurisdictions and under some statutes, adopted children were held to fall within "kindred" as statutory beneficiaries; in others they were not, and a grandson adopted as a son did not thereby bring the adopting parent within his kindred for inheritance purposes. These results are not consistent across time or geography. Any research involving adoption and inheritance under pre-twentieth-century law requires careful attention to the specific jurisdiction's treatment of this question.
Third, illegitimacy. Bouvier notes that because "kindred" in statutes of descents was construed to mean lawful kindred, illegitimate relatives were historically excluded from the class. This exclusion had significant practical consequences for intestate succession and has been substantially modified or abolished in most American jurisdictions by statute, but the historical rule will appear in older cases and must be accounted for when reading nineteenth-century authority.
Kindred also appears in constitutional and statutory provisions dealing with disqualification of jurors, witnesses, and fiduciaries — contexts where the term's precise reach (how many degrees, whether half-blood counts) may be defined by rule or statute rather than common law.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are unusually uniform on the core definition: all five sources define kindred as relatives by blood, and four of the five quote the same passage from Kent — "kindred of the whole blood, preferred to kindred of the half blood" — almost verbatim. This convergence reflects the settled baseline.
Bouvier is the most useful of the historical sources because it goes beyond the baseline definition to surface the contested edges: the possible extension to adopted children, the exclusion of illegitimate relatives under the "lawful kindred" construction, and the occasional statutory enlargement of the term. Rapalje & Lawrence is characteristically spare, directing readers to the KIN entry and cross-referencing case authority without elaboration. Burrill and both editions of Black track Kent closely without adding analytical depth.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is the twentieth-century statutory transformation. Modern intestacy law in most American jurisdictions has been reshaped by the Uniform Probate Code and its successors, which address adopted children, non-marital children, and half-blood relations in explicit statutory language that often displaces the common law kindred analysis entirely. Researchers working with modern estates law should not rely on the historical dictionary entries as statements of current law.
Jurisdictional Note
The whole-blood preference over half-blood in intestate succession has been abolished or modified in many American states by statute. The treatment of adopted children as kindred for inheritance purposes is now largely governed by adoption statutes rather than by the common law definition of the word. Researchers working across jurisdictions or across time periods should identify the applicable statute of descents and any relevant adoption statute before applying the traditional definition.