Cousin-Couples Talk About Keeping It in the Family

On April 3rd, Vice had an article about cousin couples:

Casey is proud of his 23-year marriage to Sara, but he wants to clarify something straight away: “I don’t have any other cousins I’m attracted to, and I never decided consciously to pursue my cousin.”

The couple, who are from North Carolina in the US, met properly for the first time as teenagers. There was immediate chemistry, but Casey’s father and Sara’s mother are siblings, so for five years neither acted on their desires. When they finally did, it evolved into something they “couldn’t ignore”, so when he was 22 Casey proposed to Sara.

His family were shocked. “I had one uncle tell me I deserved to be in a ditch and my dad told me I’d end up in jail, but that all died down once we got married,” Casey says. “There are uncles I still don’t speak to, but they didn’t like me before the relationship either.”

“Even I was surprised that it’s happened,” he adds. “But besides the fact we’re first cousins, it’s an entirely normal relationship.”

When Did Americans Stop Marrying Their Cousins? Ask the World’s Largest Family Tree

On March 1, 2018, the New York Times had an article about cousin marriage.  The study dispels a common myth that Americans used to marry their cousins just because of geography.  It turns out it was more of a cultural thing.  These days the culture has changed a lot with cousin romance being taboo and homosexuality being mainstream.

It has been conventional wisdom that Europeans and North Americans married more outside their families as geographic dispersal ramped up between 1825 and 1875, with the advent of mass railroad travel. But over the same period, the genetic relatedness of many couples actually increased. It wasn’t until after 1875 that partners started to become less and less related.

This 50-year lag might indicate that shifts in social norms played a bigger role than geographic mobility in getting people to wed outside their bloodline. It’s also just one example of the insights that can be gleaned from the world’s largest, scientifically-vetted family tree, presented in a study published on Thursday in Science.

Compiling and validating 86 million public profiles from Geni.com, a genealogy-driven social media site, the authors generated 5 million family trees. The largest tree consisted of 13 million people, spanned an average of 11 generations and included both Sewall Wright, a founder of human population genetics, and the actor Kevin Bacon (the two are separated by 24 degrees, in case you were wondering).

I really like the idea of a global family tree.  I wish God would provide an accurate and complete family tree for every person who ever lived.  The best we can do is DNA testing and research, but it becomes more difficult as you go back in time.

Marriage between cousins

On February 4th Fiddlehead Focus, a newspaper in Maine, had an article about cousin marriage.

It wasn’t so long ago that marriages between first cousins were illegal in most states.  The rationale behind the law was that the children of first cousin marriages would be either mentally or physically defective.  The prohibition between first cousin marriages had been around a long time. In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church forbade cousin marriages to the fourth degree.  Other religions, including Protestantism, didn’t impose restrictions.  In fact, some religions actively encouraged cousin marriages and even uncle-niece marriages to keep property in the family and their children in the religion.  Many royal families married their cousins routinely, and in ancient Egypt dynasties favored brother-sister marriages.