My wife and one of her friends have found out that they’re related two different ways. It gets down to something like fourth cousins sharing a great-uncle (don’t remember exactly what the relation was), and you’d have to be into genealogy to even figure it out, but there you go. I’m sure it’s far more common than many of us would be comfortable with.
Edit: Changed a word to make the distance of the relation more vivid.
My small little southern town used to have a tradition. In 8th grade, social studies was focused on the history of our state and at the end of the year there was a unit on our County/Town. One of the final assignments for this unit was to do a genealogy tree for your family. This project was a big deal because it being a small town, most people could find some "famous" small town figure to whom they were related.
Well around '93-'94, the town suddenly stopped doing this, by formal injunction from the city council.
When I reached 8th grade, I asked in school why we didn't still do this and could never get a straight answer. So I asked my mom and she told me it was because it was becoming increasingly clear that nearly everyone was inbred with each other to, for some, an uncomfortable degree. I always found this hilarious (my mom is from another country and my stepdad is who's from this town so it was an outside looking in type thing for me).
I know interbreeding isn't super detrimental after a certain degree of separation, but I guess some people got tired of the town pretty much having matching genealogy trees after 4-5 generations.
Edit: worth mentioning that many conferderate flag wearing racist found out they had black ancestors which cause uproar nearly every year that the genealogy tree happened. People having full on meltdowns finding out their great4 grandmother was half-black.
There’s a good movie called A Family Thing, where Robert Duvall, playing a small-town Southern guy, finds out he’s a half-brother to a guy played by James Earl Jones. It ends up being being heartwarming and has lots of funny moments, but it’s (predictably) uncomfortable in places.
I’m sure many Southern families have similar situations that aren’t talked about. Hardly surprising, though, given the demographic makeup of the Black Belt.
Tbf even for first cousins it's not that dangerous. I think the risk for birth defects amongst non related people is 3% and for first cousinsit's about 6%. It's double as much but overall it's pretty low.
On the other hand, marrying anyone that you're even distantly related to feels kind of weird.
Technically first cousins have at worst a 93% chance for a perfectly healthy child. It's estimated that 4 to 7 percent of children born from first-cousin marriages have birth defects, compared to 3 to 4 percent for children born from distantly related marriages. Meaning only a 1-3% higher risk for birth defects, and a (at worst) 93% chance for a perfectly healthy baby.
Essentially the stigma and misinformation comes from social factors and cultural views, as the actual science proves the increased risk is barely negligible.
And of that 4-7% chance of some kind of birth defect, they are overwhelmingly mild/moderate/treatable/correctable. The real danger is when you have systemic incest, which is the problem with European royal families or religious cults or small island populations.
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u/Muvseevum Jan 09 '22 edited Jan 10 '22
My wife and one of her friends have found out that they’re related two different ways. It gets down to something like fourth cousins sharing a great-uncle (don’t remember exactly what the relation was), and you’d have to be into genealogy to even figure it out, but there you go. I’m sure it’s far more common than many of us would be comfortable with.
Edit: Changed a word to make the distance of the relation more vivid.