I wish I could find some untouched color photos of the “blue Fugates”. That’s intriguing. I remember reading about an African tribe that practices inbreeding in part to keep alive the members who have extra phalanges.
One thing that may throw some people off or contribute to rumors of inbreeding could be the incredibly complex relationships caused not my inbreeding but by intermarriage. My maternal grandfather’s family lived in the Appalachian foothills of
central Alabama and their surnames and genealogies get very confusing very quickly but, until midway through the 20th century, didn’t actually involve inbreeding. There was a migration over a decade of about 100 people of British, Huguenot, and strangely enough Swiss stock who settled the area from Georgia and the Carolinas who moved into the area during and after the removal of the Creek Indians. They had thousands and thousands of descendants and the genealogies require a machete to get through.
Example: One of the original settlers was my ancestor George D. (1790-1862), who became a very wealthy landowner (estate valued at a not-too-shabby $60,000 [not including slaves] in the 1860 census). George D. had several [consecutive] wives. By his first wife, who was part Creek, he had a son who produced his granddaughter, Paralee D., born in 1840 when her grandfather was about 50. By his much younger last wife, Carrie, he had several children, including a daughter named Peggy D., born ca. 1858 when her father was in his late 60s.
Granddaughter Paralee married farmer John R. at the dawn of the Civil War and had several children. She died young and her husband remarried, this time to Peggy, who though 18 years younger than her predecessor was also the first wife’s [half] aunt. There were many children by this marriage as well, making the children of John R.'s first marriage the half-siblings and the cousins of the children from his second marriage.
Meanwhile: George D. died early in the Civil War. Within 16 months of his death his widow, Carrie, had remarried (this time to a man much closer to her own age) and given birth to J.H.G., the first of her children with her new husband. J.H.G. fell in love with (or at least impregnated and married, in that order) Katie, the daughter of John R. and his first wife Paralee. Now, while J.H.G. and Katie were no relation by blood, they were uncle/aunt by marriage (Katie’s stepmother being J.H.G.'s half-sister), and their (15) children were related several different ways to the children of John R. & Becky.
The woman that my grandfather (a son of J.H.G. and Katie) referred to as “Grandma Peggy” was simultaneously his:
1- step-grandmother (she was married to his biological maternal grandfather)
2- half-aunt (she was the half-sister of his father)
3- his great-great aunt (she was the daughter of his great-great-grandfather)
And her children, of whom there were many, were his aunts/uncles (because they were his mother’s half-siblings) and his first-cousins (because they were his father’s nephews/nieces) as well as more distant cousins.
As I’ve mentioned in other threads, this was a mild case of confusing genealogy. One of Grandma Peggy’s sons, Reuben, married as his second wife the sister of his daughter-in-law, causing all kinds of odd relations, while another of Grandma Peggy’s sons, Dothan (?), married as his second wife the daughter of a family friend who had already married Dothan’s daughter, making his son-in-law his father-in-law, his own daughter his [step] mother-in-law and his children by his second wife the aunts/uncles and the nephews/nieces of his grandchildren. While this last one was effed-up genealogy pay dirt, no actual inbreeding was involved, but it would sure as hell sound like it to an outsider.
Point: Extremely complex and interwoven genealogies were very frequent occurrences when there was a limited genetic pool, and while it wasn’t necessarily inbreeding it would sure sound like it to an outsider. The elders of the families kept up with the genealogies not for the reasons that many bored blue hairs of today do, but for the practical reason of explicity preventing inbreeding (“Let’s see boy, you wanna go with Carrie Ann- now your Mama is a Herndon, and her mama was a Beauchamp, and Carrie Ann’s mama was a DuChamp, and Old Man Duchamp was her granddaddy and he was married to a Herndon, but… that was his second wife, her grandmama was a Haardst… you alright then…”.)
The problem came in the 1940s and 1950s when some cousins did marry. They weren’t first cousins, they were in fact third cousins, and their parents tried hard to prevent the marriages, but third-cousin marriages are legal in every state and generally they’re not even that dangerous (you could conceivably marry your third cousin and never know you were related, particularly if it was matrilineal and you didn’t know the “fallen off” family surnames well). However, the problem was that because of the complex genealogies, they were third cousins several different ways as well as fourth and fifth cousins, etc., and because back in the 18th century there really had been some first cousin marriages in the family (extremely common, especially among the wealthier classes) that added ammo, and basically a trap that had been winding up for over a century was sprung and a particular type of rare lung affliction that would ordinarily have occurred once in a generation attacked from several sides and caused the deaths of several children in one decade (and health problems for the surviving kids). It was because of this that the hill communities put an unofficial ban on the intermarriages of certain families- if a Golson wanted to marry a Hayden, they had to cross into a county in a different part of the state where nobody knew them because no minister or J.P. would marry them in their own county or the surrounding ones, and though they didn’t know the word most likely there was literally a tribal move to exogamy- “Marry somebody who ain’t from around here, who’s got a last name we ain’t heard before”. This was one reason my mother married my father- he was from a different part of the state and his surname and those of his mother and grandmothers weren’t to be found on the family trees (my mother fell in love with a cousin who had her last name when she was about 14, and even though they were only distantly related [about fourth or fifth cousins] the fact they had the same surname and were related on other sides as earned parental disapproval on both sides, then she began dating an Italian from NYC who was stationed at an AFB in Montgomery and that was frowned on because he was a Yankee and- gasp- a Catholic, so even though my mother was only 15 and her new boyfriend was almost twice that AND her high school teacher to boot the fact he was Protestant, Alabamian, and no known relation all led her family and the community to give their immediate blessings and that’s how I got my particular parents.
Who were married several years before they realized they were cousins, but that’s another story.
Sorry, I got off on a tangent, but the point is that inbreeding and intermarriage are two different things and the latter occurs far more often than the former but closely resembles it to some researchers. And that’s why I’m not good at math.