kinship traced through the mother's family is called what kind of descent
Matrilineality Matrilineality is the tracing of descent through the female line. It may also correlate with a societal system in which each person is identified with their matriline – their mother's lineage – and which can involve the inheritance of property and/or titles. A matriline is a line of descent from a female ancestor to a descendant (of either sex) in which the individuals in all intervening generations are mothers – in other words, a "mother line". In a matrilineal descent system, an individual is considered to belong to the same descent group as her or his mother. This matrilineal descent pattern is in contrast to the more common pattern of patrilineal descent from which a family name is usually derived. The matriline of historical nobility was also called her or his enatic or uterine ancestry, corresponding to the patrilineal or "agnatic" ancestry.
Sister, Sister (TV series) In the sixth-season episode "Father's Day", the twins meet their biological father, Matt Sullivan, and learn that he is white and a famous photojournalist. Matt never married their mother, Racelle Gavin, because they never got the chance: she had been asked to paint a mural in Florida and he had been assigned "the opportunity of a lifetime" in the Middle East. Also, Racelle told him that she would later join him in Tel Aviv without telling him of her pregnancy. After six months, Racelle suddenly stopped writing. When the girls' mother died, Matt was not allowed to see them because he couldn't prove he was their father. When he searched for his twin daughters, he never found them because they had been adopted by two different people.