Family and kinship are fundamental concepts of human society and of political governance. Proceeding from the notion that frequency of reference can be taken as a simple measure of visibility and representation, this study examines diachronic trends of kinship reference in British parliamentary debates from 1800 to 2005. Using the Hansard Corpus and pattern-driven corpus linguistic methods, I show that changes in the frequencies of reference to kin reflect societal attitudes to gender roles.