Even if Mom hadn’t intervened, it wouldn’t have been that bad. With a name like *Blanky McBlank * there probably wasn’t much chance you would have got pregnant.
What do you think the one correct answer is?
I agree with the direct lineage (mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, sister, brothers) being not such a good idea, but I’m fine with first cousins.
Just to say that, as a former Marriage Registrar in England, I know that in law over here there is absolutely no bar to first cousins marrying.
The old Marriage Act 1949 included a table of who could marry whom; the list for blokes is here.
It used to be the case in Scotland that a man could not marry his mother-in-law - why he would want to is a mystery, but there you are. The same applied to women and their fathers-in-law. However, about 25 years ago there was a geezer who did want to marry his mother-in-law, who petitioned the House of Lords for consent, which it granted.
The bar on son/daughter-in-law marrying his/her mother/father-in-law was removed in the Marriage Act 1994.
This topic was covered in a very funny episode of 30 Rock last year. The Head and the Hair. Liz goes on a date with a hunk and discovers, once they have arrived in his swank apartment, that he is actually her third cousin.
The irony being that Darwin was married to Emma Wedgewood… his first cousin! 
Cite
That rule was never imprinted on me. Nobody got around to wagging a finger and saying, “Thou shalt not have relations with your relations.” I have no sisters, and all my cousins live 300 miles away.
Here’s another angle. You’ve heard the old thing about how old married couples start to look like each other. The reason is that people are likely to marry somebody that looks likes the opposite-sex parent. That is, a guy will be attracted to a girl who looks like Mom looked when she was young, and vice-versa.
So, we shouldn’t be surprised when we think our cousins look hot. 
Second cousins or farther is fine with me. I only know one of my second cousins anyway, though I have lots of them. I have discussed this with people on occasion. I don’t think of anyone on my dad’s side as attractive–they look too much like him!–but a lot of my male cousins on my mother’s side are hot. Like, constantly chased by non-related women hot. I don’t know that I would ever be personally involved with a relative–mine are all kind of crazy, outside any genetic issues that might arise.
One of my father’s sisters was married to a man who grew up with her as her stepbrother. That actually is more oogy to me than cousins hooking up.
Look, sometimes things can get completely out of hand.
I would find it creepy to perve on any of the relatives I’d already met, and I’ve met up to my second cousins.
Beyond that, I dunno. shrug
Personally, the closest I got was having a big crush on my half-cousin (we shared one grandparent.) Ten years later I am relieved that nothing happened. But in general, as long as they are consenting adults, I don’t really give a shit. It would still be wierd, especially if it was members of my own family, but I’m not big into telling people who they can and can’t sleep with.
Depends, among other things, on how easy it is to get “new blood” in the particular culture.
My father’s side: Basque/Navarrese. Having a common great-great-grandparent would already be considered too close. Having ancestors who were married to each other, even if the current generation is not blood related (you know, widow marrying a widower or sequential marriages) would be too close.
My mother’s side: Catalan. A first cousin of Mom’s, whose parents are first-cousins, married a first-cousin… on both parents’ sides! Being culturally B-N, I find this notion so yucky I even have problems writing it. Mom finds it perfectly normal.
Although both are in Spain, the first group is waaaaay more likely to have two people be related. You just have to climb the family trees far enough. In Catalonia, which has been receiving immigrants constantly since forever and without any need for special grants from the local rulers… people don’t have this notion of “heck, we’re all cousins here.”
But you’re related to everyone to some degree. Where do you draw your line…what constitutes “related” to you?
but not as sordid as it sounds…
I’ve been doing a lot of genealogical research in recent months, and my maternal grandfather’s family is fascinating and could probably serve as a control group for a doctoral student in genetics (I’ll leave the thesis to him). Mustang (my grandfather) was a descendant of several different members of a 69 family (that’s “immediate families”- many were, as you’ll see, related) wagon train that came to Alabama in 1820, specifically to a settlement called Dutch Bend in Autauga County- a still mostly rural county that borders Montgomery County and has several bedroom communities for Montgomery.
The intermarriages between the descendants of these families is one of the most confusing and nebulous and spidery things you’ll ever see. Many were already married to first and second cousins when they arrived, and seemingly all were hyper-fertile. For example, my grandfather’s great-grandfather was one of three brothers in the train. We’ll call these brothers G1, G2 and G3.
All of them brought their wives (in his great-grandfather’s case the wife was also his first cousin), all of whom were the first of their family groups in the county, and by the 1850 census there are 26 HOUSEHOLDS by this surname (each of the brothers had a huge family). That’s not counting all of the households where the female head was a daughter of one of these brothers (censuses in 1850 recorded first names of women but not their maiden names), and it’s not counting the kids in these households, of whom there’d have been well over 100 all descended of the original 3 brothers.
Another of my grandfather’s ancestors on this train was his great-great-grandfather, D1, who married three times, had 16 children born between his early 20s and early 70s, and my grandfather is a descendant of two of his wives (the first wife- his great-great-grandmother- and the final wife, who was 45 years her first husband’s junior and who remarried upon his death and produced my grandfather’s father with her second husband). D1 had four brothers who came on the same trek D2 through D5.
Now, the descendants of G1, G2 and G3 did not knowingly marry each other (even though 2 of the brothers were married to their first cousins) and the descendants of the brothers D did not marry the descendants of the other brothers D, BUT the Ds and the Gs married the hell out of each other, and they also married the Rs and the Ps and the Ts and the S’s and others who came on that train. It became more or less a patrilineal thing- you didn’t marry someone with your same surname, if possible you didn’t marry anyone with your mother’s maiden name, anyone else was fair game. Of the 15 or so surnames on that wagon train, most of the descendants have most of those surnames in their
family history or among their in-laws.
Now, these early settlers didn’t have families, they had freaking tribes. A family of 8 was considered small; my great-grandparents had 15 children who lived to adulthood and at least 70 grandchildren, and my great-grandmother’s father had 18 or so children by his 2 wives and at least 90 grandchildren. The descendants of those 1820 settlers were probably already in the thousands by 1900, and they’d been intermarrying constantly.
My grandfather had (half)aunts and (half)uncles who were also his (half) first cousins, and he had 1st cousins who were also his 2nd cousins who were also his 3rd cousins several different ways. It was confusing when I realized that this had been going on since 1820 and reaching critical mass, but when I started doing genealogical research I found out that the wagon train came from Orangeburg South Carolina, and books on the history of Orangeburg SC have indices that read almost exactly like the index of an Autauga County history book (same surnames- the phone books of Orangeburg SC and several communities of Autauga County AL also read alike even though the names are uncommon and almost never appear outside of central SC or central AL), and in reading the history of Orangeburg, these exact same families have been intermarrying since at least as early as the 1740s! Golsons marry Deramuses marry Rawlinsons marry Roys who marry Deramuses who marry Stoudenmires who marry Golsons who marry Choodys who marry Deramuses who marry Huttos who marry Judys etc etc etc etc etc- for 260+ years! These people aren’t quite inbred (save for some first cousin marriages 200 years ago), but their so 2nd and 3rd and 4th and 5th cousined to each other that they’re practically one big kin cluster.
I later found out that at least two of the families in the tree had been marrying each other since Switzerland in the 17th century!
Now a scary thing is- as was mentioned in a recent thread on family histories- most ancestors completely disappear after about 4 generations, meaning that most Americans know who their grandparents were and may even know who their great-grandparents were, but by the time it gets back to great-great-grandparents many of the names are lost and the family connections are lost. Just going back to the great-great-grandparents (that’s the generation that was adult in the Civil War in my family) I was surprised how many of the kids I went to school with were, judging by the surnames, my distant relatives. In Autauga County, this was no different.
In the 1940s some of my mother’s first cousins married other descendants of the Dutch Bend wagon train. They knew that the family names had appeared at other times in the family, but they didn’t feel they were very closely related, and they weren’t in that they weren’t first or even second cousins. However, because of the incredible overlap of ancestors they shared (by the time you get back to 1700 or so they’ve probably got 3/4 of the same ancestors as their spouse) they were 2nd or more cousins MANY different ways, and a particular lung ailment began affecting the children born of these unions (one couple lost 4 of their 6 children to it) and other recessive genes and genetic quirks started materializing. This also began happening to other families in the area who didn’t think they were that closely related- no more than FDR and Eleanor- but because of the CENTURIES of intermarriage they were more closely related than they thought.
It got so bad that by the time my mother was a teenager, you LITERALLY had to round up a “council of elders” if you wanted to date anybody whose surnames or whose mother or grandmother’s maiden names were the surnames of ANYBODY who was known to be in your ancestry. The old people would rely on memory and family Bibles and the like to try and determine the degree of relationship- and if there was “blood” in the last century, you didn’t date that person because it was considered two dangerous. Sixth cousins had become the new first cousins in terms of taboo. (As I’ve mentioned before, one reason my mother began dating my father was that he was from a different part of the state and nobody had heard the surnames from his family- they later found out they were indeed cousins, but the genealogical research I’ve done shows it was only about 7th cousins, and half the married couples in the world probably have that much consanguinity).
So, this has me wondering: is it genetically more dangerous (by way of offspring) to marry a 1st cousin, or to marry a 3rd cousin who’s a 3rd cousin many different ways? And this Dutch Bend, Alabama- Orangeburg, SC connection: how many times and places has that occurred throughout the country, with people today having no idea of how interwoven their ancestry is? I know that the Amish and Mennonites have incredibly interwoven ancestries and the Mormon apostate polygamous communities are famously fusterclucked in their tangled lines, but it’s fascinating how families that weren’t cultish or even, after a time, particularly isolated can get so strangely and complexly and unknowingly multiply inbred.
*(On the subject of ancestral ignorance, I know for a fact many people in the area don’t know that Choody and Judy and Toody are the same surname- just different spellings- and the surnames didn’t change until fairly well into the 19th century- same with Geese/Guice/Geiss and Culp/Colby/Kolb, all of the same family where some members spelled it differently from limited literacy or intentionally Anglicized it.)
The odd thing is that interracial dating in these areas (which is more common and more tolerated in the modern deep south than many outsiders realize) doesn’t help the situation that much by way of new blood as many of these families owned slaves who stayed in teh area (often keeping the surname), and judging from the fact that the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules from the area just in my family surnames tend to show WAY MORE M’s (for mulatto) among child slaves than there are Bs (for black) among adult female slaves would imply that the men in these families were probably spreading their same mixed up ancestries among their slaves, and since the slaves mainly had children with other slaves on the same or neighboring plantations and the neighboring plantatiosn were often owned by members of the same kin group, the black people are probably all largely related to the whites descended from these groups.
(A wagon train left Alabama just before and another just after the Civil War carrying a couple of hundred people from this area to Texas and later Oklahoma; to this day if you look at a map of surname distributions, you’ll see the surnames Deramus, Golson, and many others cluster in Orange County, SC/Autauga County, AL/and in northwest Texas- I’ve no idea how much they continued the traditions of intermarriage.)
If any common ancester can be found.
What if he’s found, and it turns out he died before living memory of anyone still around? Or to make it even clearer, that he died in AD1864?
Can anyone else clearly hear Sampiro’s ancestry research being read during long arrangements of Willie Nelson humming and flat picking the tune to “I’m my own Grandpa”, interspersing the vocal verses in here and there?
Well, I can’t match Sampiro’s record, but found while doing research that three brothers of my great-grandfather married two sisters and a cousin of surname D.
In the next generation, my grandfather married the daughter of a third surname D sister. So my grandparents had two sets of double-uncles and aunts and several double cousins.
In the case of the third brother, it would be an uncle of my grandfather and a first cousin once removed of my grandmother, again related to both sides of the marriage.
Not incest in any way, since the two lines did not breed back in, so to speak, as far as I have been able to determine - But the two families may have been pretty cozy during those Minnesota winters in the 1880s (and early 1900s for my grandparents)
Anything farther away than first cousins would be fine, I think. I’ve got one first cousin who isn’t related to me by blood since she’s the product of a previous marriage. By objective standards, she’s pretty and bouncy, but does basically nothing for me. I met some of my second cousins (I think: they’re my great-uncles, kids’ kids) in Canada when I was about 17, and there were a couple of hot, intelligent, and talented girls in that group. I definitely was attracted to them and don’t feel very oogy about it.
Of course, the woman I ended up marrying is about as unrelated to me as possible; she’s Japanese. Also, better looking and probably smarter than me. We’re going to have hot hybrid children