To most of the people in the world the persons who are nearest are the other members of their families.

In one sense your family is your household, the group of people with whom you live. In another sense it is the series of ancestors and descendants through whom property passes by inheritance. In this sense we speak of property "passing out of the family". In still another sense it may be the whole number of ancestors who have made you, biologically, what you are.

The household family is something with a short period life cycle: you are for some twenty years a child in one household, and then for some twenty years a parent in another,―such is the normal rhythm. In the long period―the five hundred year "age", there is normally such a mixing and diffusion of blood that one must speak rather of race and caste than of family. The inheritance family or dynasty is something with a life span longer than a household, but seldom as long as five centuries.