Something to Keep In Mind

Theme Song: Family Affair by Sly and the Family Stone

My mother once told me that one of my uncles was married to an aunt that was a distant cousin.  I don’t think they were first or second cousins, but perhaps closer than 6th or 7th.  It seems as if the family had married in with that family once before and it was something not to be spoken of.

“Don’t tell anybody,” my mother said in a hushed tone.  “And don’t bring it up around the family.”

Thinking it was a source of shame I kept my mother’s edict to myself and I’m only speaking about it now.  Why?  Because a few weeks ago I discovered that my grandmother’s aunt married my grandfather’s relative. My mother was related to the male offspring from both sides.  When I mentioned it to her she played it off like it was old news.  “I thought I told you,” she said.  “It’s a small town and a lot of the families intermarried.”

There’s really nothing to be ashamed of because it has been done through the centuries.  FDR and Eleanor were cousins and so was Charles Darwin and his first cousin, Wedgwood.  Writer Steven Pinker tackles the subject in the current National Review  article about the popularity of genealogy.  In the article he writes:

The paradox is resolved by the realization that our ancestors must have married their cousins of various distances and removes, so that vast numbers of the slots in one’s family tree are filled by the same individuals. Imagine, in an extreme case, that your parents were first cousins. Then two of your great-grandparents on your mother’s side would also be your great-grandparents on your father’s side–you would have six great-grandparents instead of eight. Genealogists call this “pedigree collapse”: the necessity that as you trace your family tree backward, it will fan out for a number of generations until it begins to encompass most of the people in the available population, whereupon it falls back on itself, coinciding with the original growth of that population. The rate of collapse depends on the size of the pool of potential mates and the average rate and closeness of cousin marriages. But the fact that our ancestors never covered the surface of the Earth ten deep shows that medium-distant-cousin marriages must have been the rule rather than the exception over most of human history. This chronic incest, by the way, did not turn our ancestors into the cast of Deliverance. The degree of relatedness, and hence the risk that a harmful recessive gene will meet a copy of itself in a child, falls off a cliff as you move from siblings to first cousins to more distant cousins.

Which makes perfect sense to me, although I am not advocating that folks use their family reunions as pickup grounds for finding the pefect mate.   You might know the person’s background a bit better and, hopefully, like your in-laws more but it is pretty much a sticky wicket to explain to your children.  The downside is if there are underlying health problems in your family, such as the Fugates from Appalachia, intermarrying relatives help to exacerbate the problem.

Bio-diversity is the wave of the new millennium.  Go out and get your foreign spouse today!