Marry Your Cousin

I am an Appalachian. I grew up in the mountains of North Georgia, and I still live within a stone’s throw of the Appalachian Trail here in Dutchess County, New York. I am proud of my heritage.

Many people don’t seem to realize it, but we Appalachians are a little sensitive about ethnic slurs that are routinely directed at us. One of the most hurtful is the oft repeated charge of rampant incest. Mountaineers are no more apt to engage in incest or to marry a close kinsman than anybody else.

As a family historian, I have found that I have to go back eight generations to find any repeats in ancestors. My maternal grandparents were fourth cousins, but I doubt that they were aware of the relationship. This means that my mother is her own fifth cousin. My sister and her husband are seventh cousins as I gleefully informed them last year. It would have been difficult for me to marry a woman from my hometown who was not a distant kinswoman since most families had come there by similar migration routes and had been in contact for two centuries. I married a Yankee woman, however, and we would have to go back to at least the 17th Century to find any possible common ancestors. Since she is mostly Slavic, and I am mostly Scots and English, we would probably have to go back a lot further.

But when you really think about, what is wrong with marrying your cousin? My maternal cousins were kind of like sisters to me, so that would have been a little weird, but I didn’t know my paternal cousins very well at all and might have dated them without any such awkwardness. In 26 states, there is no prohibition on marrying your first cousin. In the other 24, there are prohibitions, and I am not sure at all why this would be the case.

Right off the top of my head, I can think of a number of benefits of marrying your cousin:

You already know your in-laws; they are your beloved uncle and aunt and not some wackos that you will come to hate.
Your wedding guest list will be about 33% smaller since you will have a lot of common invitees.
You can keep family legacies within families more easily.
You already know your cousins and should be able to choose a mate from among them more wisely than from among a population of strangers.
Your cousins will probably be compatible with you in religion and culture and social status.
Holidays won’t be such a big problem, since both sets of parents are in the same family.

I delight in confounding Yankees with tales of the complicated family relationships we Appalachians enjoy:

My father’s ex-wife is my nephew’s grandmother.
My wife’s brother was married to her nephew’s mother.
My half-brother’s sons are both my and my step-sisters’ nephews.
My grandfather’s youngest son is my mother’s ex-brother-in-law.
My mother’s great grandson is also the son of my niece’s husband.
My uncle married my mother’s sister-in-law.

What a bunch of wacky hillbillies we are.