ANCESTRY QUESTION?
Greg Resch (resch@cpcug.org)
26 Jan 1995 21:07:27 -0500
> ...In my family (besides the fact that my maternal grandparents were first
> cousins once removed) there are a fair number of cousin-cousin marriages.
>
> In days when travel was more restricted and people tended to marry within
> a small geographic locality, second and third cousin marriages were
> *very* common....
>
> In the middle ages the Church went to foolish extremes in
> prohibiting marriages between relatives, insisting at one
> point that 40th degree relatives could not marry....
^^^^^^^^^^^
That claim, notably unsubstantiated (as well as contradicting the writer's
own preceding paragraph), is false on its face. Almost no one, then or
now, could track such a precise relationship. And, were it true, and were
such a proscription enforced, the population level would have imploded.
History is curiously silent on such a catastrophe.
Perhaps the writer's admission of rampant consanguinity among his forebears
(in his next-preceding paragraph) suggests a cause for his making such wild
statements.
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