Crazy George Married His Half-Sister

George Wass and his wife Alice recently won the lottery. Oh, and they came from the same womb.

[T]he £5.3million lottery winners' tangled love life was unravelled when the Mirror yesterday confronted them with records that showed they shared the same mum, Margaret Wass.

Alice, 61, who lives in a caravan on a rubbish tip with George said: "This is all coming out now. What am I supposed to do?"

"If I'm getting you right, we've got the same mother but different fathers. You have learnt a lot more than I have." George, 63, walked out on his wife Mabel and their three children after he met widowed Alice.

Mabel said last night: "He was always nicknamed Crazy George so it was no real surprise when he did something like this." [Link]

Third Cousins Are Made for Mating

Scientists have analyzed Icelandic family trees and found that third cousins have the greatest number of offspring.

For example, for women born between 1800 and 1824, those with a mate related at the level of a third cousin had an average of 4.04 children and 9.17 grandchildren, while those related to their mates as eighth cousins or more distantly had 3.34 children and 7.31 grandchildren. For women born in the period 1925-1949 with mates related at the degree of third cousins, the average number of children and grandchildren were 3.27 and 6.64, compared to 2.45 and 4.86 for those with mates who were eighth cousins or more distantly related.

The findings hold for every 25-year interval studied, beginning with those born in the year 1800 up to the present day. [Link]

A Twisted Twin Tale

Lord David Alton stated last month that a pair of twins separated at birth had met and married. His remarks made international news last week.

"They were never told that they were twins," he said during the Dec. 10 debate on a law covering human fertility and embryology. They had been adopted by separate families and "met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."

No further details about the couple have emerged, and it is not known when the marriage took place or how long they were together before they discovered the truth. [Link]

Jon Henley is skeptical.

Here's the thing: it all came from a single remark more than a month ago by the vehemently anti-abortion Roman Catholic peer and father of four, Lord Alton, in favour of all children having the right to know the identity of their biological parents.

He had heard about this particular case, he said, from the judge who handled the annulment. Or perhaps (he later admitted) a judge who was "familiar with the case". Britain's top family judge, Sir Mark Potter, has never heard of the story. And, as the excellent Heresy Corner blog notes, the whole thing is statistically improbable, procedurally implausible (for 40 years, adoption practice has been to keep twins together) and based on the equivalent of a friend in the pub saying, "Hey, I heard the most amazing story the other day." [Link]

[Thanks to Nancy for the initial tip!]

Not Anti-Marriage, Just Anti-Auntie-Marriage

Capt. Di Simone was not pleased with his son's choice of wives.

"I particularly wished that he should not marry my wife's sister," said the Captain yesterday, "and that is just what he has done. You see what a position it places me in. I am my son's brother-in-law, and should he have children, I'll be uncle to my own grandchildren. I'm father-in-law to my sister-in-law, and my wife is her sister's mother-in-law. It's a bad mix up. The relationship is too close, and there's too much of it."

The son has married his aunt, and will therefore be the cousin of his own children, and should his father have more children, he will be uncle of his own brothers or sisters.

Capt. Di Simone wonders whether the young man will hereafter pay him the respect due to a father or will be the familiar brother-in-law. [The New York Times, Mar. 13, 1897 (pdf)]

Their Marriage Is Legal in Every State

Simone Chiha and Jaime Garner met through Match.com in 2005, and married last November. Ever since their first date, they've been finding unexpected connections between their families. Simone's stepfather knew Jaime's mother as a teenager. Simone's godmother worked for Jaime's family as a nanny in Germany. Her grandmother and his great-grandmother are buried in the same cemetery.

"I was thinking, great, he's going to tell me we're long-lost cousins," Simone says.

Jaime called his mom, who had a wall of genealogy charts in her office, and he rattled off the names he'd been given.

"She starts looking on our tree and says, 'None of these names are on our family tree.' She's gone back at least five generations, and there's no relation." [Link]

Land of the Dating Cousins

Everyone in Iceland is related. So says the website islendingabok.is, home to a registry of nearly Icelander born since 1703. Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir was skeptical.

“I am not related to my boyfriend,” I stubbornly insisted the other day, having carefully made sure we weren't before we started dating. I was having a debate with my brother about his theory that all Icelanders were related to each other. He offered to prove it to me.

The next day there was an email from him waiting in my inbox. I opened it and discovered a list of names and dates of birth – a family tree. I recognized some of the names and soon realized that this was a list of my ancestors and my boyfriend’s ancestors, all the way back to the 18th century.

Apparently we share a great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, whose name was Gudrún Einarsdóttir. [Link]

Inbreeding Can Be Healthy

Residents of the tiny town of Stoccareddo, Italy, eat all the bad stuff that doctors warn us about. But they rarely develop heart disease or diabetes, and often live into their 90s. What's their secret?

While at first glance nothing seems to be unusual about the town, a closer look reveals almost everyone is related and shares the same last name of Bau (pronounced Bow-ooh). According to Amerigo Bau, the unofficial town historian, the first Bau family arrived in Stoccareddo from Denmark about 800 years ago and ever since, Baus have been marrying Baus.

"It happened because the town was in the mountains," explains Amerigo Bau. "It was isolated, and so the likelihood of marrying another Bau was quite strong."

Most Baus tended to marry more distant relatives and not first cousins, which can cause genetic defects. [Link]

Forbidden Love Not Always Forbidden

As Valentine's Day approaches, let's take a moment to recognize the creepily close couples from whom we descend. I'm talking about those couples who shared one set of grandparents—or maybe two—and still managed to produce offspring able to walk upright. We have them to thank for lopping whole branches off our family trees, and keeping the number of our ancestors from getting out of hand.

The people at Cousin Couples are all about simplifying family trees. They aim to destroy the taboo of cousin marriage by exposing our commonly held beliefs as myths. Who knew that you can marry your first cousin in 26 states, Canada, Mexico, and anywhere in Europe? Who knew that in my home state of Maine you can marry your aunt or uncle's child "as long as . . . the man or woman provides the physician's certificate of genetic counseling"? If my cousins were at all appealing, I'd be tempted to make a move.

The site also lists several famous figures who married a cousin, among them Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Jerry Lee Lewis. In case you don't recognize the names, two of them were geniuses, and the third was a noted scientist.

So, the next time you learn that one of your ancestors married his cousin, don't think of it as creepy—think of it as probably not illegal. And the next time one of your first cousins flirts with you, just ask yourself one question: "What would Jerry do?"

[tagged: genealogy]

What About Franklin and Eleanor (Roosevelt) Roosevelt?

From The (Mbabane, Swaziland) Swazi Observer of Nov. 30, 2005:

‘Nothing wrong with couples sharing surname’

Stories by Zweli Maseko

CATHOLIC Bishop Ncamiso Ndlovu has said there is nothing wrong with marriage of people sharing a surname, especially in his church.

[snip]

Ndlovu said people should not misinterpret what happened at the Manzini Cathedral Church on Saturday, where a Dlamini married another, as incest because the two were not related; it was only that they shared a surname.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

A Lesson in Consanguinity

Seen in the Windham (Ct.) Herald of Mar. 20, 1800:

From the Trenton (N. Jersey,) Federalist.

Married, at Middletown, (Monmouth) on the 5th ult. Thomas Tilton, in the 76th year of his age, to Mary Lucar in her 13th year. She is the daughter's daughter of Thomas Tilton's former wife; so that this husband and wife were at least half grand father and half grand daughter.

—At the same place, a few weeks since, John Lucar, the brother of the above-mentioned bride, to his half-aunt, Catharine Clinton, widow, and daughter of Thomas Tilton, the above named brides groom.

Query If both the above pairs should be blessed with legitimate issue (if their issue can be legitimate) how would genealogical readers rank them in the degrees of affinity, so that the term might clearly express their nearness of kin?

Let's see. . . If Thomas and Mary had a son, he would also be Thomas' step-great-grandson, and both the half-brother and nephew (by marriage) of his daughter Catharine. If John and Catharine had a daughter, she would be the granddaughter and (by marriage) the niece of Thomas. Thus, the boy would be both the half-uncle (through Catharine) and the first-cousin (through John) of the girl. If they were to marry (God forbid) and have a child, it would be its own second-cousin.

I think.

For more, see I'm My Own Grandpaw and An Argument for Inbreeding?

An Argument for Inbreeding?

Every genealogist knows that the number of one's ancestors increases exponentially the further back one goes. Each person has two biological parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. In the tenth generation (counting oneself as the first) one has 512 ancestors; in the twentieth one has 524,288; in the thirtieth one has 536,870,912. Adding up the members of each generation from the second to the thirtieth, we find 1,073,741,823 total ancestors. Go back a few more generations, and we have exceeded the number of persons who have ever lived on Earth. And yet, thirty generations (assuming each to measure 25 years) takes us back only to the thirteenth century!

Of course we haven't each had a billion distinct ancestors since the Middle Ages. We have all found (or will eventually find) loops in our family trees—near or distant cousins who marry, and so share common ancestors. If my father and mother were first-cousins (shared one set of grandparents), I would have only three sets of great-grandparents, and my family tree in previous generations would be reduced by a quarter.

There is an upper limit to the number of ancestors one can have at any given generation. But is there a lower limit?

Consider a society which allows siblings to marry. If a brother and sister married in every generation, one would have two parents, two grandparents, two great-grandparents, and so on. One would then have only 58 ancestors to track down through the thirtieth generation!

Now suppose that one's parents are first cousins who share both sets of grandparents—in other words, the father's parents are siblings of the mother's parents—and that this pattern is repeated in each preceding generation. One would then have four grandparents, four great-grandparents, and so on. Through the thirtieth generation, one would have 114 ancestors—still a very manageable number.

More Reading:

• Straight Dope: 2, 4, 8, 16 ... how can you always have MORE ancestors as you go back in time?
• Redundancy in Ancestry
• The Olive Tree Genealogy: How Many Ancestors Do We Have????
• Some Thoughts on Ancestry and Nobility
• A Simple Way to Count Parental Lineage
• Historical Text Archive: Number of Ancestors We Have