[or-roots] kin marriage problems

[Leslie Chapman]

Ater we lost our second child to hydrocephalic syndrom we had a consultation
with a genetic counselor of some sort, (march of dimes or some such, don't
remember, it was a traumatic time) and what he told us was that because we
were related as we were we had doubled our chance of having the problem.

As to the reasons, for marrying Kin, the main reason I have heard was to
keep property in the family. When I was in Iran the subject came up there
and my friends poointed out that often cousins will marry there because they
are acquainted from having grown up together. Often in the third world, if
you are not marrying a relative you have known from growing up together, you
ended up in an arranged marriage to a complete stranger. In some Islamic
societies, if you aren't marrying a relative, you may be marrying a woman
whose face you have not even had a chance to look at, let along get to
really know her.

As to geographic reasons, I always have to tell the story about telling the
electrician my wife's grandmother hired to fix the kitchen lights that I was
actually her nephew as well as her grandson-in-law, his response was, "they
opened the tunnel you know" which of course doesn't mean anything to anyone
not familiar with western Douglas County, Oregon. We have a tunnel on the
main highway between the Willamette Valley and the coast and his point was
that since we had such easy access to a larger geographic area couldn't we
have gone farther afield to find spouses. He didn't know that I came from
the other side of the tunnel of course.

The point of this long winded discours however is that in the 17th and 18th
Centuries people didn't move around as much, or as easily as they do now. I
have mentioned it in here before, if you have ancestors that spent much time
in those two centuries in Concord, Massachusetts, there is a high
probability that we have a connection. I have never sat down with any of the
censuses or town rosters from that time to try and really piece it together,
but I suspect there are points in time, especially in the 18th century when
everybody in town was related in one way or another.

Three or four years after we moved here I remarked to a barmaid here in
Reedsport that in one way or another I was related to half of  Western
Douglas County, her response was "Well, you are not related to ME!" Within a
year she was living with the brother of my cousin's wife. Which in my family
lexicon makes her family.

Les C