Do you know of any odd family/trees or marital relationships of famous people?

Factual Questions
1

Background: I’ve designed and am tweaking a new genealogical numbering system because I haven’t found one that I like. One of the features is a cross-referencing/correlational chart for when Grandma is also a cousin and an aunt- i.e. the same person fits into your family tree more than once. In my own family this includes some first cousin marriages (common all over the nation at the time I must add to preclude Alabama jokes :wink: ) and several ancestors who married relatives-by-marriage such as stepsisters or their first husband’s nephew or the like, a lot of “two siblings married two siblings producing double-first cousins” type things, and other such stuff that’s not quite inbreeding but does make for some complex relationships.

I’m not the only person who has these, so in the paper I’m writing I’d like to use famous examples of this in the text and possibly as numbering examples. A few examples:
President Benjamin Harrison’s second wife was his first wife’s niece and there were children by both marriages. (John/Abigail Adams & Franklin/Eleanor Roosevelt were also cousins, though more distantly).

Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Jesse James all married their first cousins (Jesse’s wife and mother were both named Zerelda).

The guy who owned Sea Biscuit (name eludes me at the moment but easily found) and his son married sisters.

If you open the field to royalty of course you have Henry VIII marrying his brother’s widow and other such, but I’d rather stick to commoners. I also intend to use the polygamous family of Brigham Young (among other things he married two sets of sisters, 6 widows of Joseph Smith, and two of his wives had a full-brother married to Brigham’s oldest daughter) and the incestuous family of Herod the Great (where uncle-niece marriage was about the most common type) to show the extreme examples on the chart. For now though, I’d rather stick to commoners with more moderate genealogical oddities (and I know there was some famous monogamist who married, consecutively, sisters, but can’t remember who).

Any suggestions?

2

I’m not sure if this counts: Thomas Jefferson’s siring children on his wife and his wife’s half-sister.

3

I think you got them all! Try checking out India, which is still doing plenty of this stuff, and may have someone famous but non-royal enough for your purposes.

4

Cool- can’t believe I didn’t think of that one. Has the added benefit of figuring a way to code illegitimacy. Thanks!

5

Uh … what?

You might want to be more specific about what kind of Indians you’re talking about. In my ethnic group, we’re not supposed to marry someone related to us within seven generations.

In some parts of India, you can marry anyone who is inside your caste, but outside your gotra. This means, for example, that you could marry your mother’s siblings’ children or your father’s sister’s children, but not your father’s brother’s children.

Still, I don’t know that there is so much more of cousin marriage going on in India than in other places.

I believe that among Muslims, a man’s brother’s daughter (uncle-niece) is considered a worthy match.

6

Back when I was working on my undergraduate thesis, I had Augustus Caesar’s family tree pretty well memorized – and that particular sampling would serve as a stress test for any genealogical classification system, I assure you. Multiple marriages, marriages to cousins, adoptions, not to mention the problem of everybody having the same damned name. Backwoods West Virginians would be truly envious of the deformed scrub oak that is the Augustan tree.

Here’s an example. Augustus had only one child – a daughter named Julia, brought into the world by his first wife, Scribonia. His second wife, Livia, had two sons of her own from her first marriage. One of these sons was Tiberius, who, as a young man, was happily married to Vipsania, the daughter of Augustus’ best friend, Marcus Agrippa.

With me so far? Here’s where it gets complicated.

Julia’s first marriage comes to a sudden end when her dashing, young, and suspiciously healthy husband, Marcellus, drops dead. So Augustus marries his newly widowed daughter off to his old friend Agrippa. This union bears a whole crop of kids before Agrippa, too, wakes up one morning to find himself in Elysium.

Still with me? Okay, now try to keep up.

You remember Tiberius? Well all these years later, he’s still happily married to Agrippa’s daughter. Never one to let sentimental attachments get in the way of politics, Augustus forces Tiberius to divorce Vipsania and then to marry the twice-widowed Julia. So in one fell swoop he marries his own step-sister, who is also the widow of his divorced wife’s father. Thereby becoming overnight his own ex-stepfather-in-law.

7

Actually the case of Charles and Emma Darwin is more interesting. They were first cousins, as you mentioned, their common grandparents (Josiah and Sarah Wedgwood) were third cousins, and one of Charles’s sisters married one of Emma’s brothers.

8

Author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s parents were Caroline Quiner and Charles Ingalls.
Charles’s sister Polly married Caroline’s brother Henry and Charles’s brother Peter married Caroline’s sister Eliza Ann, leading to a family with three sets of double first cousins. Cite.

And there’s the whole Woody Allen/Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi mess, where Woody & Mia’s children Rodin, Malone & Moses are both siblings and uncles/aunts to Woody & Soon-Yi’s two daughters. And Mia’s daughters Lark & Daisy married brothers.

9

Do Franklin and Elanor Roosevelt count? They have a common ancestor (Nicholas Roosevelt - see chart on linked page).

10

Actress Gloria Grahame married director Nicholas Ray and Ray’s son (from an earlier marriage) Tony. She had kids with both Nicholas and Tony, which probably produced a convoluted family tree

Actor George Sanders married Zsa Zsa Gabor and Zsa Zsa’s sister Magda

From the almost-but-not-quite department: Shortly after Rolling Stone Bill Wyman married 18-year-old Mandy Smith, Smith’s mother began dating Wyman’s son Stephen. However, that pairing never made it to the altar.

11

I also want to use Andrew Jackson’s because it shows adoption (and technically bigamy, though I’m not sure how to do that one). Andrew & Rachel were evidently unable to have children biologically, so when her sister (who was in bad states financially and had many children already) gave birth to twin boys Andy and Rachel chose the one they wanted (like picking out a puppy) and raised him from birth. His twin brother (not sure if it was fraternal or identical) was his first-cousin by adoption.

12

If it had, Bill Wyman would have been his own grandpa…

13

There’s the biblical character Lot, who fathered two sons on his own daughters.

To add to that, Lot’s sister was married to his paternal uncle.

Fun stuff!

14

There was a bit of “inbreeding” in Richard Nixon’s ancestry. I’d have to look at his pedigree to remember just what it was, but it was a case of a marriage between first cousins, once removed or second cousins, once removed - something like that.

15

Rudolph Giuliani, married a woman who he thought was his third cousin. He later claimed that, after 14 years of marriage, he found out she was really his second cousin, so he got the marriage dissolved in the Catholic Church.

Dean Butler, who played Almonzo Wilder on Little House on the Prairie married his second cousin, who he met at a family reunion. Odd place to find a marriage partner.

16

A bit of an aside, but I’ve taught several intro to genealogy classes recently and, always a huge believer in props, I actually began the last couple of intro sessions by showing the attendees (a lot more people turned up than I expected incidentally) a printed and (very cheaply) framed copy of this image. It’s what I privately term a “Beacon Pa & Ma” image: a strained anagram & acronym of sorts for a generic Bearded Patriarch/Constipated looking Matriarch" of the sort fairly ubiquitous in homes (including mine), flea markets and the occasional Cracker Barrel (though I don’t share that particular terminology with the class.)

Anyway, I don’t identify the couple other than to say “This couple has an interesting story. He was born in a tiny community called Cuba, New York in 1836, and like a whole lot of other families he and his parents and many siblings drifted south following cheap new fertile land, settled on a sequence of farms in Illinois and then in Wisconsin. That’s where he married her and his brother married her sister, which used to be a fairly common double alliance.” (I didn’t know about the third one.) “He had a combination of wanderlust and the general farmer’s luck that required him to move about once or twice a decade. Even though he was the perfect age for a Union soldier and probably could have used the $400 substitute fee he never fought for himself or for a richer man in the Civil War…” and I briefly mention his adventures in settling prairie land and problems with Indian treaties and drought and blizzard and having to leave farming to manage a small hotel for a while before finally settling in DeSmet, South Dakota, first on a farm and then in a small house in town when his health declined, and she survived him by many years and they had five children though no descendants are alive today… I basically make it known that the couple and their kids went through very little that sounds particularly interesting and nothing that a million or millions of other small farmers didn’t go through during the same decades.

Now, the polite students feign interest up to this point, the less polite have already stopped pretending to pay attention by the time I’m through with the 90 second/2 minute spiel on the couple, which is actually the preferred reaction. That’s when I do the whole “REST OF THE STORY” part and mention that, “Oh yeah, they were main characters in several of the bestselling U.S. books of all time that have sold millions of copies and never gone out of print even though the first came out more than 70 years ago. And they also inspired, very loosely admittedly, one of the most successful long running television series of all time.” With this and a couple of extra hints if necessary (oldest daughter went blind/2nd daughter wrote their story when she was an old lady in the Depression [and it made her rich]), etc… This usually re-attracts their attention.

The method behind the madness of the introduction is that…

I got tired of the “according to my mom we have Indian blood” “Dad says we’re descendants of Robert E. Lee” “I want to see if I’m related to Alex Haley and Kunta Kinte since my family’s from close to where he lived in north Alabama”, etc. (all actual claims and of course none panned out- it’s the Lee one I’ve heard the most).
So… the reason I go into the bit on the gens Ingalls (and this I mention when I’m finished with it) is this: “You may be the exception that proves me wrong, but you’re probably not going to find out that you’re a lineal descendant of George Washington and his long forgotten first wife, the Cherokee Princess Peggy Shakes-Like-a-Trout who was actually the illegitimate daughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and even if you are you’re probably going to find that most of your other lines are, like mine, mostly very simple living “just barely getting by” farmers and slaves and smalltime merchants or tradespeople who moved a lot, had farms worth $400 or so in various censuses, and had a bunch of kids- some with ‘where’d the hell they come up with that one?’ names and served as privates or non-coms in wars if they served at all and they probably don’t have homes that are now museums. HOWEVER, as the popularity of Laura Ingalls Wilder writing about her completely seemingly mundane parents who nobody would ever have remembered had her own daughter not convinced her to write their story, the fact these people weren’t rich or famous or really ‘anything special’ at all in their own lifetimes doesn’t mean that they aren’t absolutely fascinating to us today. And, oh yeah, they’re extension cords that connect you to history. And so as Dr. Hannibal Lecter observed, ‘Okey dokey, here we go…’”

May not be quite that long obviously, but it’s an intro I’ve grown to like, and there’s always a “Damn… she looks a little like Ma maybe but he doesn’t look a damn thing like Little Joe Landon’” comment or two, but having taught several of these now it actually seems to soften the blow a bit that grandma wasn’t Harriet Tubman and grandpa wasn’t John Wilkes Booth, because a surprising number of people wonder why you care if they weren’t famous or “other than average”. And of course the odd names that are guaranteed in any lineage or finding out this one had a kid when he was 75 or that one had 22 children and that one was sent to a prison in Elmyra, New York that’s been called the Yankee Andersonville or that you had ancestors on both sides in “the war” or that your great-great-great-grandmother and her children can be tracked in wills where they’re bequeathed to several generations of a family and finally manumitted and ultimate left part of the estate they worked one or that your grandmother Missi’s real name was Missouri Lorena or that your son’s given name has been in the family non-stop for 240 years proves- and these are all things I’ve actually found for various attendees- are actually just as if not more interesting than learning “yeah, you’re the great-great-grandson of both Sitting Bull and Custer”, both times by their affairs with Cherokee princesses.

17

PS- The Lee connection in most southern genealogies I’ve traced usually is true, but it’s because

1- Lee is not an uncommon surname (currently the 24th most common in America, and before Garcia, Martinez, and Rodriguez were added to the list and the Scots-Irish swelled the number of Jacksons and Moores and the German Schmidt’s Anglicized to Smith, etc., it was probably in the top 12 or so)

2- Even if it is “the” Lee family, the first Lee in America of that line was Richard, who was one of 8 sons himself [and some of his brothers/nephews later came over] and he himself had six sons who lived to procreate (and they and their descendants often had large families), thus it’s not that huge a distinction

3- The family tended to practice primogeniture meaning that the vast majority were hustling for a buck and completely undistinguished. (Robert E.'s birth at Stratford Hall, which his own father lost, was actually because his dad married a cousin from the line that inherited it.)

One of my own Lee lines is positively connected to the Richard Lee line, but they were so undistinguished that on the 1849 marriage of their (14 year old) daughter to my (35 year old) ancestor the surname was spelled Lea due to a combination of forgetting the connection and the family dropping into illiteracy along the line. (The much closer “famous” connection than their very very distant cousin Bobby E. is that one of their daughters married Sam Houston.)
After the Civil War however that entire branch of the family changed the spelling. In 1860 they’re all Leas and in 1870 they’re all Lees. I guess in the desperation after the war you had to stake a claim to some dignity/prestige/pretense-of-former-wealth [though R.E. Lee grew up in what could be called ‘genteel poverty’] where you could.

18

Actress Lynn Redgrave’s husband John Clark got his wife’s assistant pregnant. She never named him as the father, but later married Lynn & John’s son Benjamin, who adcopted the boy, turning his half-brother into his adopted son.

The truth about the boy’s paternity came out later at a Thanksgiving dinner. And you thought your holiday get togethers were bad!

19

Boy does that one strike home! I tracked my wifes family back through the Revolutionary War - they were Tories and ended up going to Canada. Returned to the USA after 50 years or so. Did a pretty good job of getting names, dates, etc. Sent copies to most of the relatives who I thought would be interested.

Pretty universal response “Well, grandpa always said there was Indian blood in the family so I think you’re wrong.”

You know, don’t confuse me with the facts, just let me dream of my Cherokee princess naked in the forest.

20

pedigree collapse:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_083b.html

Embarrassed to say :eek: , but there are 2 pairs of 2nd cousins in my family - 1 from Mom, 1 from Dad. Thankfully, Mom & Dad ain’t even close to being related [other than by marriage :slight_smile: ]