Jane married Mike, they had a daughter, they divorced all within 1 yeara.

Within a year Jane married Frank (Mike’s brother), and they had a daughter.

The daughters are cousins and half sisters and about 3 years apart.

Your cousin may be kinda cute, you never know.

So might your sister…..

*ducks*

The most convoluted example is from Genesis 19; a story probably told by the ancient Israelites as a way of insulting nearby tribes of the Ammonites and the Moabites.

Lot (Abraham’s nephew) escaped from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah with his two daughters. No other men were available, so the daughters decided to have children by their father Lot. They both bore sons to their own father — who were designated as the ancestors of the Ammonites and the Moabites respectively.

The two boys are thus brothers. (Same father). They are also cousins. (Their mothers are sisters). Each is also the uncle and the nephew of the other. (The two mothers are their sisters as well, and hence children are nephews).

If you want complications in the family tree try for a double first cousin marriage (not in my direct ancestral line, two sisters married two brothers and two of the children married [they had no children], then there was the third sister whose daughter married her first cousin and had an affair with her husband’s [but not her] first cousin [and did have children but by which father?]).

So, I’m at my grandparents’ house doing my research for that, but I hit a confusing bit. Some back-and-forth between the branches verified the source of my problem–two of my great-great-grandparents were first cousins. I started to ask my mother about this, but she shushed me. “Grandma’s in the next room,” she said, “and she doesn’t like to talk about that.”

As far as I can tell, there are no health repercussions showing up in my family from this. If you’re thinking about marrying a cousin, though, I do need to warn you: it will make for a major pain in the ass for your great-nth grandchildren when they’re drawing a family tree for a school project. Seriously. That relationship’s so damn hard to draw. 🙂

Two first cousins had married and their off-spring, including her mother, had various physical defects. She herself had spinal nerve problems for which she had recently had major surgery. She showed me her long scar up her back and talked of other problems she and members of her family had. Her mother was born without a hip. She was born with an in-turned foot and scoliosis.

I was in shock that she admitted this all so freely. There were other people around in this store. She was angry about it all I guess and felt that others should be warned about what she referred to as “southern in-breeding.”

I’m sure it doesn’t happen all the time but it sure did in this family.

*To me the most immediately obvious potential issues are the scope of ‘eugenics’ and ‘public purpose’ and the sufficiency of the latter for the definition of the former…