I’m coming up with a fictional family tree for a project (that really doesn’t need it, but I’m writing history and… ). I’m trying to figure out how much a family would marry within the same families. The period in question is about 1880 - 1915. I already have one man who’s married his second cousin and two cousins who married sisters (that’s three different extended families involved in this sentence).
I know it wasn’t terribly uncommon to marry your cousins and I’m not really trying to make this into an inbred mess (the madness will take care of messiness on its own - did I mention this is a MAD SCIENCE! project that I’m making up backstory for?), but really I don’t want to make up a whole bunch of surnames, especially since some of these people have six kids… I’m lazy, alright?
It would help to know what country this takes place in, and what socio-economic class the characters are.
Assuming this is the US, it would be more common among the upper classes, and less common among the lower classes. There were also lots of immigrants during that time, and they would be less likely to have access to their extended families for marriage.
Sorry, I meant to put that in… It’s Ohio, US. I’m not sure what class - they’re educated enough to do mad science, but they run a pub / bar / restaurant (whatever) to fund it (and have a place to converse with other mad scientists).
In Ohio, you will find the political Taft family, some of whom rose to the peaks (President William Howard, several Ohio governors), but some of whom served their communities in lesser ways (small-town councils, etc.)
If you look at this page you will see that several of them married relatives with the same name:
*Hannah Taft, daughter of Jesse Taft, married to her 2nd cousin, Eastman Taft *
*Mary Taft, daughter of John Taft, married to her 1st cousin once removed, Jacob Taft *
See if you can find The Forsyte Saga in your library. It’s a sprawling set of novels from that era, and most editions include a gigantic family tree laid out in the frontispiece.
From the historical side, two of my great-great-grandparents were first cousins, married around that period (1880’s or 1890’s, I believe); and my grandmother (their grandchild) evidently considered that something of a family scandal. This would have been in a farming family in Ohio or Indiana, IIRC. I don’t know if it was considered bizarre at the time, or if my grandmother had picked up 20th-century prejudices later on, though.
From the practical side, I discovered this while doing a family tree project for my eighth-grade history class, and I can tell you that any gain in mental energy expenditure from not having to make up extra surnames will be spent and re-spent in trying to draw out that goddamn collapsing family tree. You’ll either have to solve it like a puzzle, to make sure the right children end up next to each other so you can mark them married, or have little end notes explaining that the John Smith in one part of the tree is the same person as the John Smith in another part of the tree. Talk about your genealogical nightmares.
Well, speaking from my own family, both sides, 11 and 14 generations only one cousin marriage, that of unknown degree, probably not first. Mostly educated for the time and place, mostly middle class, fairly mainstream socially, other than often being on the wrong side of the reformation in their country of residence. (wrong on both sides, over the whole time period) Germany, France, Netherlands, England, Ireland, Pennsylvania, and across the US in the twentieth century. One mystery member of the chain was not who he said he was. The guy who arrived in the US was not the guy who left England. He died on shipboard and his body was returned to England and buried there, while some other guy was buried in Pennsylvania under the same name and birth dates, decades later.
One collateral relative in recent times married a woman of the same surname (not my family name) but they were unrelated genetically, as far as I know. Actually, several of my thirty some first cousins are not genetically related to me.
This article says it is illegal to marry your first cousin and first cousin once removed in Ohio. You might want to check when the law went on the books in Ohio. It possible it wasn’t illegal back during the time frame of the story.
I know one women that married an older man and then divorced him and married his son from an earlier marriage. Genetically it’s fine, but it sure makes for an complicated family tree when your nieces and nephews as also half-siblings.
You need to come up with a backstory for your characters and work forward from there. Are they from a small town that was settled in the early 1800’s? Odds are the marriage pool is much smaller and there are a lot of second cousins in the immediate area. Are they from a big city that exploded with the westward migration and waves of immigrants in the mid and late 1800’s? It’s likely their circle of acquantances will be much wider and include many more non-kin.
Even at that you have a lot of leeway. My grandparents came from a tiny village that seems to have neither grown nor shrunk in size over the last several centuries. My grandmother had eight brothers and sisters, and they all appear to have married people who weren’t related to them, anyone else in the family, or each other. I don’t even know how you could have 10 unrelated families in an area like that.
Thanks everybody. I wasn’t planning on going as far as first cousins, but I think there’s going to be four or five families that intermarry a lot, as well as outside blood. Unfortunately, I have to set aside this and actually work on the stuff that’ll give me a grade.
Another anecdote: in my family tree, one of my great grandfathers and his brother married a pair of sisters (not their sisters, but two women who were themselves sisters). There’s a handy way to save a last name.
It also wasn’t uncommon 75-150 years ago that, when a woman died and had small kids, the widower would marry her sister. Happened on two different sides in my family. Genetically not a problem.
In part of my family tree from slightly before the time you are interested in, one woman married her first husband and had some kids, then he died and she married another man and had some more. Two or three generations down some cousins through these half-siblings married. They turned out to be two of five families which intermarried quite a bit anyway, then you add in the phenomenon of maiden names being used as given or middle names for sons. So there were quite a few cousins and in-laws with names like Wilson Johnson Smith, Jones Rogers Wilson, and Rogers Jones Smith. If that helps with a real life example.
I have some ancestors who were really intermarried. There were five family names in a county in western Virginia who almost exclusively married each other for several decades, from about 1800 to 1880. In my g-g-grandmother’s generation, out of 36 cousins, 26 were double cousins, and out of the remaining 10 single cousins, four of them (two couples) married each other. None of the double cousins married each other. They seem to have been mostly German with an admixture of “mulatto”, as they say on the census. You can get lost in the whole craziness starting here.
I have no idea what was going on there. Yes: eventually someone was born with six fingers (according to his WW II draft card).
