Marrying Cousins

In my various ancestral searches, I’ve encountered many instances of people marrying their distant cousins. If this didn’t happen, then the number of unique ancestors would quickly swell to more than the number of people on the earth. So, for example, my wife is my tenth cousin, my parents were ninth cousins, etc.

Usually, these types of relationship are back several generations and were often not even known by the individuals involved. But occasionally there are closer relationships, perhaps third or even second cousins. Relationships closer than that are not typical, although they are legal in many places. Here is a summary of existing laws in the US:

According to the NCSL, cousin marriage is legal in: Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina (in North Carolina, first-cousin marriage is legal, but double-cousin marriage is prohibited), Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia.

In Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Utah and Wisconsin, first-cousin marriage is allowed under certain circumstances:

·        Arizona: If both are 65 or older, or one is unable to reproduce

·        Illinois: If both are 50 or older, or one is unable to reproduce

·        Indiana: If both are at least 65

·        Maine: If couple obtains a physician's certificate of genetic counseling

·        Utah: If both are 65 or older, or if both are 55 or older and one is unable to reproduce

·        Wisconsin: If the woman is 55 or older, or one is unable to reproduce

First-cousin marriage is prohibited in: Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming.

However, it is not legal to marry your sibling or half-sibling in any of the 50 states.

But being legal and being common are two different things. Recently, while doing some ancestral research into people in my church, I encountered the closest relationship in a marriage that I had yet encountered. As I followed various hints in ancestry.com, here is a portion of the tree that was taking shape.

[Tree]

 

As you can see, the top and bottom of the right-hand side of this tree are identical to one another. This mean that the parents of Paul Sutherland are not only first cousins of one another, but that they are “double first cousins”, i.e., they are cousins on both their father’s side and on their mother’s side. Genetically, this double-cousin relationship is equivalent to being siblings.

But was this tree accurate? I needed to do some further investigation…

I started out by looking at the 1860 census records for both the Sutherland and Dyer families.

[1860 Census Sutherland part 1 and part 2]

[1860 Census Dyer]

As you can see, William and Sylvia Sutherland had a total of 8 children – 5 boys and 3 girls. The Dyer family, Simpson and Ritter, also had 8 children – one boy and then seven girls. These two families ended up having more than one marriage between them – and as expected, because the Dyer family had so many girls, both of them involved one of the Sutherland boys and a similar aged Dyer girl. So, Jasper Sutherland married Louisa Dyer and his younger brother, Daniel Sutherland, married Louisa’s younger sister Mary Tennessee. Nothing real unusual there, I’ve seen multiple connections between families before.

Both of these families are now living in the same county in Virginia. Now, let’s move forward forty years and see them in the 1900 census.

[1900 Census Jasper Sutherland]

[1900 Census Daniel Sutherland]

Jasper and Louisa have had a total of 11 children, of which 8 are still living (death during childhood due to various diseases was fairly common back then). In 1900 the youngest 5 of these 8 children are still living with them, including their son, Elihu D, age 16.

Not that far away, Daniel and Mary have had a total of 6 children, of which 4 are still living – and all of them are at home, including their 20-year-old son. One of their children is a daughter, Hilsey Bessie, age 15.

But now it gets REALLY interesting. Moving forward 30 years, here is a single page of the census.

[1930 Census Sutherland page 2]

ALL FOUR of the children of Daniel and Mary Tennessee Sutherland are living in consecutive household!

o   First house – Noah and his wife and two children

o   Second house – Nellie and her husband (last name now Bowman), their 8 children and the matriarch of the Sutherland clan, Mary Tennessee

o   Third house – Frank and his wife and two children

o   Fourth house – Elihu D, his wife Bessie (as noted above, [Hilsey] Bessie is the daughter of Daniel and Mary Sutherland, i.e., Elihu’s double-cousin) and four children, all boys (an older son has married and left)

Mary Tennessee Sutherland is not only the matriarch of this clan, but her entire family is living around her!

But it gets better! Here is the prior page of the same census.

[1930 Census Sutherland page 1]

·        First house – Alex Sutherland, his [second] wife, and 7 children. Alex had a total of 15 children, 6 with his first wife and 9 with his second wife. His first wife was Ritter Sutherland, whose parents were William and Sylvia from above, i.e., he married his second cousin!)

·        Second house – Parmer Sutherland, his wife, 3 children and a niece, Beatrice Counts. Parmer is one of the sons of Floyd in the next house. (note that Counts is the maiden name of Sylvia [Counts] Sutherland from the 1860 census above)

·        Third house – [William] Floyd Sutherland, his [second] wife, and 5 children. Floyd is one of the other sons of William and Sylvia. Like Alex above, Floyd had a large family – 17 children, 8 children with his first wife and 9 with his second wife. And like Alex who married a second cousin, Floyd’s first wife was his second cousin, Didame Sutherland, and she was a sister to Alex.

Have I confused you yet? And this is just on two consecutive pages of the 1930 census! Because of the number of children in these families, I strongly suspect that there are more of them located elsewhere. But my brain is already fried just trying to unscramble this small slice of the Sutherland family.

While all the above marriages were technically legal, what an “connected” family – so many cousin marriages in one family, including a double-first-cousin marriage!