More notes on lines these pages already print.
Ten counties named from two
Most of the table's Parent cells name one county, or the words Original County. Counting the Parent column specifically for cells with exactly two names, separated by one comma, turns up ten rows: Alamosa, Cheyenne, Crowley, Elbert, Jackson, Kiowa, Ouray, Rio Grande, Washington, and Yuma.
Broomfield's Parent cell has four names, not two, a difference covered on its own elsewhere in this wave. This note is only about the rows with precisely two parent names, no more and no fewer.
The ten pairs, as the table prints them
Alamosa: Costilla, Conejos. Cheyenne: Bent, Elbert. Crowley: Bent, Otero. Elbert: Douglas, Greenwood, the dissolved county covered elsewhere in this wave. Jackson: Grand, Larimer. Kiowa: Cheyenne, Bent. Ouray: Hinsdale, San Juan. Rio Grande: Conejos, Costilla. Washington: Weld, Arapahoe. Yuma: Washington, Arapahoe.
Two pairs share both names in reverse order: Alamosa's Costilla, Conejos and Rio Grande's Conejos, Costilla name the same two counties, printed in opposite sequence on their two separate rows. The table does not explain the reversed order; both rows simply print their own pair as written, with no cross-reference linking the two.
Eight of the ten rows have no matching reversed pair anywhere else in the table: Cheyenne's Bent, Elbert; Crowley's Bent, Otero; Elbert's Douglas, Greenwood; Jackson's Grand, Larimer; Kiowa's Cheyenne, Bent; Ouray's Hinsdale, San Juan; Washington's Weld, Arapahoe; and Yuma's Washington, Arapahoe each name a pair found nowhere else among the sixty-six rows, in either order. Only Alamosa and Rio Grande share their exact two names this way, making the reversed pair the single exception rather than a pattern the other eight rows repeat in any form.
A county that is itself a parent of a two-parent county
Cheyenne's own Parent cell reads Bent, Elbert. Kiowa's Parent cell reads Cheyenne, Bent. Cheyenne is a two-parent county in its own row, and it is also one of the two parents named for Kiowa, a county formed partly from a county that was itself formed from two others.
Bent appears as a parent in three of these ten rows: Cheyenne's, Crowley's, and Kiowa's. Bent's own row, by contrast, names a single parent, Greenwood, the dissolved county this wave covers elsewhere. Bent is a one-parent county that goes on to parent three different two-parent counties among this list of ten, the most of any single name on the list.
That makes Bent itself a product of a dissolved county's division, since Greenwood no longer exists as a current row, while Bent in turn helps form three of today's standing counties. A single-parent row and a three-times-repeated parent name turn out to be the same county, Bent, read from two different directions through this same table.
| County | Parents, as printed |
|---|---|
| Alamosa | Costilla, Conejos |
| Cheyenne | Bent, Elbert |
| Crowley | Bent, Otero |
| Elbert | Douglas, Greenwood |
| Jackson | Grand, Larimer |
| Kiowa | Cheyenne, Bent |
| Ouray | Hinsdale, San Juan |
| Rio Grande | Conejos, Costilla |
| Washington | Weld, Arapahoe |
| Yuma | Washington, Arapahoe |
Washington as both a county and a parent
Washington's own row is one of the ten, parented by Weld and Arapahoe. Yuma's row, also one of the ten, is parented by Washington and Arapahoe. Washington is named as a parent one row after being named as a child itself, the same layered structure Cheyenne and Kiowa show two rows apart on the same list.
Arapahoe appears as a parent in two of the ten rows, Washington's and Yuma's, in addition to its own Original County status covered in wave one's note on the first seventeen names of 1861. A county from the original seventeen going on to parent two of this later wave's ten two-parent counties is one more thread connecting the table's oldest rows to its newer ones.
Washington's own appearance as both a child row and a parent row also means two of the ten rows in this list, Washington and Yuma, are linked to each other directly through a shared name, not just through a shared parent-count structure. No other pair among the ten shares that same direct child-to-parent relationship; the rest of the ten draw their two parent names from counties that do not themselves also appear as one of the ten child rows.
What the created years do across these ten
The ten rows' own Created years span a wide range: Washington and Yuma both 1889, Elbert and Rio Grande both 1874, Alamosa 1913, the latest of the ten, and Ouray 1877. A two-named Parent cell is not tied to any single decade; the pattern recurs from the 1870s through the 1910s, more than four decades apart between Elbert's earliest and Alamosa's latest.
Elbert's 1874 matches Bent's 1874 exactly, the same year this wave's note on Greenwood already uses for both daughter counties of that dissolution. The two-parent list and the Greenwood dissolution share that one date without the table drawing an explicit line between them anywhere in either row's own text.
Rio Grande's own 1874 Created year matches Elbert's and Bent's as well, making three rows in this wave's reading, Elbert, Bent, and Rio Grande, all carrying that same single year, even though only Elbert and Bent are directly tied to Greenwood's own dissolution. 1874 recurs often enough across this table that a reader checking any one row's year against another's should expect to find it again, rather than treating each appearance as its own isolated coincidence.
Counting the names that appear more than once as a parent
Across these ten rows, four parent names recur: Bent (three times), Arapahoe (twice), Costilla and Conejos (twice each, as each other's partner in the two reversed-order rows). The other names, Douglas, Greenwood, Grand, Larimer, Elbert, Cheyenne, Hinsdale, San Juan, and Weld, each appear as a parent on this list exactly once.
A short list of ten rows produces, by this count, fourteen total parent-name slots filled by only ten distinct counties once the repeats are collapsed, a ratio the table itself never states but that a direct count of its own cells gives. Six of the ten distinct names, Douglas, Greenwood, Grand, Larimer, Hinsdale, and San Juan, appear only in this single list of ten rows and nowhere else as a parent name anywhere in the table's sixty-six rows, which this note checked by scanning every Parent cell a second time after compiling the count above. The remaining four, Bent, Arapahoe, Costilla, and Conejos, are exactly the four names already identified as repeating, confirming the two counts agree with each other once checked against the table a second time.
Questions
How many county rows name exactly two parent counties?
Ten: Alamosa, Cheyenne, Crowley, Elbert, Jackson, Kiowa, Ouray, Rio Grande, Washington, and Yuma.
Do any two of the ten share the same pair of parents?
Alamosa and Rio Grande share Costilla and Conejos, printed in opposite order on the two rows.
Which county is named as a parent in three of the ten rows?
Bent, as a parent of Cheyenne, Crowley, and Kiowa, more than any other name on the list.