Recently, a subscriber to the Our Black Ancestry Facebook group generated a lengthy discussion when she posted the following question, “Is anyone finding cousins marrying cousins in their tree? Or one set of family & another set intermarrying & being connected in other ways?” The lengthy dialogue that followed was definitely an indication that “kissing cousins” occurred much more often than what people think. I thought of ten reasons why this can happen. If you have other reasons, feel free to share in the comment section.
1)
Back
in the day, rural communities became populated from couples having large
families. After several generations and numerous marriages (or relations)
between others in the same community, many people ended up being related, knowingly
or unknowingly, as time passed. Many of the following generations even were
double related. To me, it seems like it was an unavoidable phenomenon.
2)
Adding
to no. 1, travel back then is not like travel today. Therefore, long distance
relationships were more difficult then, especially if the family didn’t have a
good car (or a healthy horse). This added to the likelihood of consanguineous
marriages.
3)
I
grew up hearing some people say that if a person is beyond a 3rd cousin, then
the blood is not there anymore. That was absolutely false, and DNA technology
is proving that. I find it fascinating that DNA can detect if two people are
related. If these marriages between “distant” cousins were occurring
often in the area, then I think that it may have become a norm, in a sense.
Nonetheless, some people still didn’t play that; they considered it as
“incest”. Grandma and/or Grandpa had to meet your date and ask them that famous
question, “Who
yo people?” That
was to ensure that their grandchild wasn’t marrying their cousin. According to
a family elder, before my maternal grandmother married my grandfather, she
started “courting” a man named Ben Dean of Coldwater, Mississippi. When my
great-grandfather got a wind to this burgeoning courtship, he stopped it
immediately, informing my grandmother that she and Ben were cousins. I have
since figured out that Ben Dean’s maternal grandfather, Sam Milam, and my
grandmother’s paternal grandmother, Lucy Milam Davis, were first cousins.
4)
In
addition to no. 3, people’s definition of cousinships was often inaccurate. For
example, someone who was deemed as a 4th cousin, as far as they knew, may have
really been a 2nd cousin-once removed. Therefore, that person may have been
considered “safe” to marry without much objection in families where
distant-cousin marriages weren’t a big issue. For me, I didn’t start
understanding cousinships until I started doing genealogy research. Presently,
most people erroneously think that their parent’s first cousin is their second
cousin. However, a parent’s first cousin is one’s first cousin-once removed.
The term “removed” in cousinships is still largely misunderstood. Also, your
child and your first cousin’s child are second cousins to each other. Most people
would consider the two to be 3rd cousins. This is a good diagram that
further explains cousinships.
5)
Family
quarrels and broken relationships among earlier generations could easily result
in future generations not even knowing that they are related. A deceased family
elder shared how one of my great-great-grandfather’s brothers, Uncle Sampson
Davis, changed his religion, angering members of his family who were Baptist.
Uncle Sampson decided to move to the next town, where he married and had a
large family. Sadly, he severed ties with his angry siblings. Generations
later, better transportation evolved, allowing for more frequent interactions
between people in both towns. Consequently, several of Uncle Sampson’s
descendants married (or had relations with) several of his siblings’
descendants. They did not know that they are related because of religion issues
several generations back.
6)
People
may have been influenced by the actions of other groups of people, such as the
Scotch-Irish, who often married people as close as first cousins to "keep
it in the clan."
7)
For
African Americans (descendants of enslaved people in America), the chances that
we may be distantly related to people we know, whose family roots may hail from
different states, are amplified by the fact that many families were permanently
separated during slavery. Sadly, many of these broken links will never be
traced genealogically. While as a member of the Atlanta chapter of AAHGS (Afro
American Historical and Genealogical Society), I interacted with another member
that I later discovered through DNA technology is a fairly close maternal
relative. For more about that, read An
X-chromosome Match Provides Needed Clues.
8)
Not
possessing much knowledge about your family history can easily result in the
possibility of marrying (or having relations with) a close or distant cousin.
9) The
non-disclosure of the paternity of a family member could result in two people,
who are unknowingly related, marrying (or having relations).
10) Last but not least,
some people fell head over heels in love with a “distant” cousin, especially in
situations where they didn’t know beforehand that their “ray of sunshine” was a
cousin. The attraction and love were so strong, that it overshadowed the fact
that they were cousins but not first or second cousins. Cupid hit them hard.
Believe it or not, one can’t simply turn off an attraction to someone at the
snap of a finger. We can only wish that it was that simple.
If someone starts to research their family
tree, and both their mother and father’s families were from the same small
community in the South, chances are pretty good that they might figure out that
their parents are “distant” cousins (or close cousins). I have seen this
numerous times. It happened. There’s nothing to be ashamed about, in my
opinion. It makes for an interesting family tree and great conversation. “Great-granddaddy
is my 2nd cousin-twice removed” would capture some
attention, I imagine.
