Now, now, as I like to remind people the polite term is ‘consanguination’, and my mom’s family being from Tennessee since 1793, her family tree’s more of a poplar than an oak itself.
Heck, you don’t have to be Southern to have a family tree like that. I’m a third generation Californian, but thanks to a similarly (if on a much smaller scale, and with less attempted murder) convoluted family tree, my parents are technically cousins, although they don’t share any genes. My mom also has somewhere on the order of one hundred first cousins, just on her mother’s side; Grandma Flynn was one of nineteen siblings.
Heh. Always nice to see an arborial joke.
Here I thought that Duke Boys kind of elopement only happened in Kentucky anymore.
Actually, about ten years ago my parents got very into genealogy. In the course of their research they discovered they were actually distant cousins. Still more odd was the discovery that one of my mom’s co-workers is a third cousin, which makes her daughter, for whom I’d had the hots for a number of years, MY third cousin. Gave me a shudder when I found out.
I was raised there. It is a beautiful place.
It breaks my heart that the city isn’t doing better, especially since I have tons of family living there.
Memo to myself: Never be the last post on one page of a thread just before juicy tales of cousins marrying.
If your mom and her co-worker are third cousins, you and co-worker’s daughter are fourth cousins.
And from a genetic standpoint, probably no bigger problems marrying and having progeny than any other couple. As half-Mennonite, I would have been related to nearly all of the small Mennonite town I grew up in. Doesn’t stop them from marrying each other there. Heck, if we really worked at it, I could probably find a common ancestor for Gorsnak and me.
Another one of those “unique” southern traits is our tendency to sit around discussing family in an attempt to find out whether or not we might be related. I swear, show up at any random southern family reunion of your choosing with a plate of fried chicken, a bowl of potato salad and/or a banana pudding* and before the day’s over you’re family! Even if you never laid eyes on anybody there before that day.
*Though it would be acceptable to bring just one of said items, politeness says you should show up with all three. There can never be enough of any of these at a southern family reunion.
Either way, procreating with her is out of the question, as she has turned into an enormous bitch.
Take your shirt off and you’ll be able to count to 22.
In my mother’s family, in the 1950s, some cousins actually did marry. Their parents were furious, but they couldn’t stop them since the kids were of legal age and not first cousins (first cousin marriage is illegal in most states), and the newlyweds (two sets actually) felt that since they were only second or third cousins it wouldn’t do any damage. The problem, however, was that the trap that had been slowly being pulled back for well over a century snapped shut and the kids of the unions were fired upon from every angle, because while the parents were only second cousins, they were also third, fourth, fifth, etc. cousins, sometimes doubly, and even the first cousin marriage of a century and a half before added into the mix, and the some of the kids were born with hereditary lung ailments and pediatric diabetes that had appeared in the family before but now were charging in with triple and quadruple genetic doses. It was bad.
That’s one reason that my mother was attracted to my father- he was from another county, came from different stock entirely (none of the surnames matched with her own) and therefore safe breeding material (she wanted a large family). They married and a couple of years later at a family reunion (her’s) realized that they were indeed cousins (albeit a Franklin/Eleanor sort of thing or even more distant).
Of course it would be very easy to marry a third cousin or better and never know it. And the worst thing that can happen really is that you’ll have a world famous divorce and she’ll get killed in a French car chase with some Muslim playboy guy and you end up with a much older woman with a face like shoe leather, but at least your kid will be the world’s most eligible bachelor.
More than that if you can delineate the fingers and toes of the parasitic twin growing from your abdomen. (Maybe that’s just me.)
I was gonna play the hermaphrodite card, but you win.
OK, so why I am I now reminded of an old joke?
It seems a young man in a small village was of a mind to marry, but every time he told his father about the wonderful young lass he was to marry, his father said, “Oh, no. You can’t marry her! She’s your half sister!” After this happened several times, he’d had enough and complained about it to his mother. Her response was,
Don’t listen to him! He’s no kin of yours anyway!
By the way, I do sympathize with the West Virginians around here. My best friend, who was raised in Switzerland moved down to Charleston several years ago, and I was maid of honor at her wedding. I’ve been known to make jokes as a matter of self defense! :eek:
CJ
BWAAAHAAAHAAAHAAAHAAA! Siege you have just added a joke to the swampbear repetoire. My friends and family will be ever so thrilled. 
Heck, Siege, I know that one as a song.
Sung it myself a couple of times at bardic circles. 
I concur. I was flying from Dallas to Italy once and we had a layover in Atlanta. I was marveling at how generic and unSouthern the international terminal was when the lady at the Chinese resturant replied to my drink order “You want sweet or unsweet tea”. Underneath all that cosmopolitaness, it was still the South.
I grew up in the South, mostly Alabama (Huntsville. Though Sampiro, I PROMISE you we both know some of the same people–my husband worked at the UAH library for a decade and my BIL got his MLS through UA and he and his wife both work at Tuscaloosa public) and my own ambivilance about the South is a big part of my personality. One of my students is Indian-American, and we’ve found a weird point of comparison there–he has the exact same sort of ambivilance, where there are things that are just undeniably ugly about our homes, but you can’t deny there’s things that are fucking beautiful, too.
I’d be pretty shocked if you couldn’t. My own parents are 3rd or 4th cousins or some such, but it’s not exactly clear to me how. I’ve never been much for the whole who’s related to whom game.
The South isn’t the only place constantly mocked.
I would like to present: Bakersfield, CA. We get made fun of all over California, the US, TV, and even this here message board.
Yes, we are the weird place in California: horribly conservative, country (Oklahoma-style), we eat a lot of cows, we have a lot of cows- on and on it goes. And yes, I am from California and I have a Southern accent- what of it?
This is one of the nicest communities I have EVER encountered. People are tremendously kind to one another- always giving and always looking out for their neighbors (see my thread about my friend’s funeral). Great schools, economically sound, big fancy houses, nice shopping. Did I mention the great people?
So yeah, stop picking on “Bah-kersfield,” ya’ll. Come visit and I’ll buy you some tritip.
Of course, he did his best writing while living in Connecticut.
And he was from Missouri. If Missouri is “the South,” then I essentially grew up in the South, and I could give you my opinion of it. But I wouldn’t want to ruin a nice little thread by doing that. Someone might bless my heart.
I personally prefer living somewhere that people will tell you to go fuck yourself if they don’t like you.
Whoo, Sampiro, I hear ya. Don’t have your fine pedigree, am a transplanted Southerner, but it happened pre-adolescence, so it took, plus had Southern forebears, who carried the traits into future. We scurried on back home from California when it got crowded, and now live in VA, NC, AL, and NC. No, Daddy didn’t hunt here, so will have to acclimate for a coupla generations, I guess.
I hear ya, though. In my time in Oxford, MS, working for The Center for the Study of Southern Culture, lots of folks came through for the Southern Experience, in an academic sense. Most were just lovely, but there would be those sorts yer talking about, who seemed to feel that their time in the South was akin to slumming, and that their greater intellect, landing ever-so gently upon this Sleepy Burg, was sure to enlighten the charming natives.
The natives were not charmed, of course. One wonderful Southern trait I’ve seen, and come to understand well, is what I call The Wall. Mostly, from my life in Mississippi, with blues musicians, it is a cultural wall: all social politeness is done as due, but, if you aren’t presenting yourself decently and don’t make the grade, you won’t get people to open up at all. I saw this when hyper filmmakers came in from LA; they thought they were right in the milieu, “Great Stuff”, but they hadn’t touched the beauty of the subject at all. They couldn’t slow down enough to see the complexity.
Ah, could go on. Keep going on with your wonderful detailing, too, Sampiro