Repost from '07 - Guest List Advice/Vent

My father is one of nine and my mother is one of five, so there are 31 cousins in my family. I'm not particularly close with most of them and there's a lot of historical drama there, so I only invited 6 of them to the wedding which my parents are fully supportive of. Actually, they sort of pushed it! As my wedding date approaches I'm starting to feel more and more guilty about not inviting the rest of them, but we're talking 40 additional guests including husbands, wives, guests ... What makes this worse is that FMIL keeps adding guests out of 'obligation' which I normally never care about, but now with my already existing guilt it's making me feel worse.

I'm told my hall can hold 200, but I think that will be tight. Right now my list is at 190, adding these cousins will bring it to 230. Most of those original 190 already received STDs, so cutting them is not really an option. And besides space, now we're talking several thousand extra dollars! I'm not even sure what advice anyone can give, and I don't know what I want to hear! What would you ladies do if you were in my situation?

how many guests do you think will be coming???
maybe you will have less guests than you think and inviting these people wont be too much a problem with the space/money

I think that percentage-wise if you invite 230 (this would be including all the extra people) you will wind up with under 200 attending. I think thats how the numbers generally work out, but you know your guests the best and maybe you have a higher percentage likely to attend.

If its a matter of space I think you will be able to fit, but I don't know about the money. It really depends on what you are budgeted for.

When we were doing our wedding planning we put our invitation list together, and then took an 'educated guess' on who we thought would be able to make it. We were pretty much right on give or take a few guests so you might be able to do the same and get a good idea of the numbers you are looking at.

I'm not really sure about the number coming, but we already have 99 people booked in the hotel. Just going through my list, I can't pick out too many people that I don't think will make it, so I don't want to rely on that 20% estimate.

If we stuck to the original list, we'd be fine. I should have thought about getting the 'guilties' beforehand!!!

Thanks ladies!