Well no, I haven't studied kinship in any sociological sense - I mean, if you were to pose a question like "Can my wife's cousin's daughter's son marry my aunt's brother's daughter" I'd be as flummoxed as anyone else! But if you mean more along the lines of population distribution as in genetics, then yes - that certainly interests me. For by setting up a naming convention, T3 does offer a means for tracking the spread of genes through an ecosystem.

Mind you, after just three generations - and largely due to remarriage - I've already seen all sorts of weird family structures, with children having a variety of surnames, apparently quite unrelated to their parents. But the game does appear to be handling things right, it only looks wrong sometimes! But because females arbitrarily change their last name (and often more than once too), tracing the distribution of genes is only practical via the male line, where the last name remains constant.

I've noticed a couple of anomalies so far ... single hetero women never get pregnant - they always seem to cohabit with a male (very handy as it turns out, see Footnote ** below). And no one ever gets killed in earthquakes or hurricanes, which is er ... very disappointing - for my purposes anyway Edit: It turns out there are fatalities arising from natural disasters, I just didn't notice them being reported, buried away as they were in the small print of the pop-up message!

I've also found it's a good idea to grab a list of first names from one of those baby-naming websites, as I'd run out of ideas beyond the first half-dozen or so!

Oh, and I was pretty peeved when the immigrant bearing my name produced three daughters and only one son, and the son then promptly died while still in grade school, effectively snuffing out any chance of spreading the family name. So next time I'm gonna just rename an entire family, one with plenty of sons!

** Footnote: That has resulted in a lot less work keeping on top of changing names ... I've found that by just checking for newborns every six months, and renaming those infants promptly, the renaming workload is quite small. That's because a newborn first child also enables me to spot any women who've recently changed their names through marriage, and so I can change the parents to MR and MRS at the same time as I rename their first kid. Beyond the firstborn though, I don't have to bother checking the parents. The end result is, I don't have to wade through all the adults looking for new marriages all the time - if a child is a firstborn, then I know the parents must've just got married, and retitle them MR and MRs accordingly, otherwise there's nothing to do. So I only have to monitor for first newborns every six months to pick up all the name changes arising in that timeframe.