Blood Relations

Study Materials › Reasoning › Blood Relations

Blood relation questions are pure bookkeeping — nobody gets them wrong through faulty logic, only through holding the family in their head instead of on paper. Draw the tree every time, even when the question looks short.

Notation That Keeps You Straight

Put each generation on its own horizontal line, oldest at the top.

Join a married couple with a double line; drop a vertical line to their children.

Mark gender as you learn it: + for male, for female, ? when the question never tells you.

The ? matters — if gender is never stated, the answer must be gender-neutral.

Decoding the Phrasing

PhraseMeans
My father's daughterMy sister (or myself, if I am female)
His daughter's motherHis wife
Daughter-in-law of my fatherMy brother's wife — so her husband is my brother
Son-in-law of XHusband of X's daughter
Only brother of A and BA, B and he are all siblings
Work outward from the innermost phrase. In "his daughter's mother is the daughter-in-law of my father", resolve "his daughter's mother" to his wife first, then place her in the speaker's family. Attempting the whole sentence at once is how people go wrong.

Worked Examples from Real Papers

TS Police SI 2022 — Q82

A is the only daughter of B, C is the husband of B, D is the father of C and E is the wife of D. How is A related to E?

B and C are a married couple, and A is their daughter.
D is C's father and E is D's wife, so E is C's mother.
E is therefore A's grandmother, which makes A her granddaughter.
Note: A is explicitly a daughter, so "grandson" is ruled out by the wording, not by the tree.

TS Police Constable 2022 — Q120

M is son of A. R is daughter of V. S is sister of M and R. B is married to S and K is son of B. M is the only brother of S and R. L is daughter of R. How is L related to A?

"M is the only brother of S and R" makes M, S and R siblings.
M is A's son, and R is V's daughter — so A and V are the parents of all three.
L is R's daughter, one generation below R, which puts her two generations below A.
L is A's granddaughter.
Note: B and K are there purely as noise. Not every name in the question is needed.

TS Police SI 2022 — Q81

Pointing to a man in a photograph, A said, "His daughter's mother is the daughter-in-law of my father". How is A related to the man?

"His daughter's mother" is the man's wife.
She is the daughter-in-law of A's father, so she is married to a son of A's father.
That son is the man himself — therefore the man is A's brother.
A is his sibling.
Why not "brother"? A's own gender is never given. The answer has to be the gender-neutral "sibling", and this is exactly the distinction the options are testing.

TS Police SI 2022 — Q69

In a family of eight: D is the grandson of F, G is the son-in-law of C, F is the mother of B, A is the wife of B, H is the daughter of C and the mother of D. Who is the father of D?

H is D's mother, so D's father is H's husband.
G is the son-in-law of C, meaning G married a daughter of C.
H is the daughter of C — so G is married to H.
D's father is G.
Method: "son-in-law of X" is always the entry point in these puzzles, because it fixes a marriage without naming it directly.

TS Police Constable 2022 — Q141

Pointing to a covered photograph, a man said to his brother-in-law, "She is the mother of my father's daughter". How is the person in the photograph related to the brother-in-law?

"My father's daughter" is the man's sister; her mother is the man's own mother. So the photograph shows the speaker's mother.
The listener is the man's brother-in-law — that is, the husband of the man's sister.
The speaker's mother is his sister's mother, and to her husband she is his mother-in-law.

Photograph questions hide a self-reference. Phrases like "my father's daughter" and "my mother's only son" usually loop back to the speaker or a sibling. Resolve them before drawing anything.

Also see: Coding & Decoding · Direction Sense · Arrangement & Ranking