**Cognates** (noun) — Blood relatives connected through maternal lineage, as distinguished from agnates who are related through paternal lineage.
Cognates are your blood relatives on your mother's side of the family. This is an old legal term that distinguished between relatives through your mother (cognates) and relatives through your father (agnates).
In modern inheritance law, this distinction has mostly disappeared. Most jurisdictions don't treat maternal relatives differently from paternal relatives. Your mother's siblings have the same inheritance rights as your father's siblings in intestate succession.
The term appears mainly in historical legal documents, older statutes, or jurisdictions with laws based on ancient legal systems where maternal and paternal relatives had different inheritance rights.
⏱ When you'll encounter this term
You'll rarely encounter this term in contemporary estate planning. It appears in old wills, historical legal research, or when dealing with inheritances in jurisdictions that maintain distinctions based on lineage.
The cognitive/agnatic distinction mattered in societies where property, titles, or status passed through specific family lines. Male-line relatives (agnates) might inherit family estates while female-line relatives (cognates) did not, or vice versa depending on the culture.
Understanding this term helps when interpreting older documents or dealing with international estates in jurisdictions that maintain traditional inheritance rules. In modern contexts, "relatives" or "blood relatives" have largely replaced cognates and agnates as operative terms.
**Related terms:** [Agnate](/dictionary/agnate), [Kindred](/dictionary/kindred), [Next of Kin](/dictionary/next-of-kin)
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"In the old legal document, my cognates were listed as my mother's siblings and their children—everyone related to me through my mother's side of the family."