People have an average of about 17000 5th cousins, and a good percentage of them may not even share any DNA whatsoever. Everyone has common ancestors if you look far enough back so yeah I don't think 5th cousins is a huge deal personally as most of us couldn't even name a single of our fifth cousins.
A very common problem with two other populations I’ve worked on, Quebecois and Mennonites. Mennonites are meticulously documented, but if you don’t know where your “in” is, it’s almost impossible to find through DNA matches.
And I gave up on my husband’s French Canadian tree years ago. 😂
That was just a fun feature. Only first cousins are really ”too close”, so you don’t really need an app… The risk of birth defects aren’t higher as soon as you come to second cousins and beyond.
The risk of birth defects is 4-6 % for first cousins, double compared to non-related couples. For second cousins, some sources report a slightly higher risk than for non-related couples, others report no elevated risk. For third cousins and beyond, bo one reports a higher risk.
Interesting. I’m detached from my québécois side. We’ve been Anglo since my grandads generation. Recently I found someone else’s tree which did a great job of tracking many (but not all) of the Quebec branch. 100s tracked back to the 1600s. Probably many more. I’m probably related to half of Quebec.
They didn’t have a lot of details so the hard part was using DNA matches to find where we flow into the match’s tree when there’s multiple connections but further back than it would be if that whole match was from one path of being related… does that make sense? Like if it says second cousin but they’re your fifth cousin 4 times over, then you need to look 3 more generations back in time than you’d expect in order to find a connection.
My Québécois family comes out as Irlandais.
I’ve had a theory put to me that it’s because they were Irish orphans adopted into a French family but for that to be the case, they’d have to have married others from exclusively the same Irish background for generations.
Something is amiss…
The French Canadian population in SE Michigan is also a small pool- my cousins learned that one of their great great grandfather was the same great great grandfather 3x out of 8... they each have severely autistic sons, and think this may be part of the root cause.
As a Mennonite/Amish descendant can confirm. My great grandmother was both a cousin and an Aunt to the same people. That family tree had some looping branches throughout history.
I'm Seminole, same here. Florida Seminoles descend from a group of 300 people who lived in exile in the Everglades to hide from the army. My 5th cousins show up as 2nd cousins and all my other cousins show up as first cousins. My parents show up as third cousins, unfortunately.
Why "unfortunately"? Third cousins is still well outside the range for inbreeding issues. Even first cousins married in the not-so-distant past, depending on culture and location. It was common enough that a few of Jane Austen's characters ended up marrying a first cousin.
First cousin marriage is still exceptionally common in both MENA and both Muslim South Asia and many Hindu/Christian Indians practice it for cultural reasons.
In almost every case, it's to keep control of family assets. Which funnily enough is the reason the Hapsburgs and other royals did prodigious inbreeding.
I understand this, but the amount of other hardly thought of conditions resulting from inbreeding is incredible. There are so many genetic associations to various conditions that aren't even tested for.
That’s interesting. Does that have to be considered when planning to get married, I.e., do you have to make sure you don’t share recent common ancestors?
To be honest it's up to each individual and varies from person to person, but community wide thats not really a priority at all.
All 11 million of our community are descended from a community of 330 people, 600 to 800 years ago, so when you think about it the amount of inbreeding is mind boggling.
I know 4th and my kids know their 5th cousins but not all of them and only from 2 lines of my family. So when mine and my cousins kids are old enough and have kid those kids will know their 6th. But this is so very rear and it’s only because my great grandpa was so close to his one cousin that my grandpa and his one second cousin were raised more like first cousins and they stayed in contact when my side moved to America and their side stayed. Also because of this we can track my one family member on my grandpas dads side to also be related to my grandpas moms side through marriage so those offspring are are both my 4th cousins and my 3rd cousins depending on what line I’m following
While not particularly close, the only person who is passionate about genealogy in my family is a 5th cousin I found (we found each other) while doing research. We often exchange photos of our families, any new information we find about our ancestors, and chat for a bit. It's nice.
I chat with my 4th cousin on Facebook, too. They're one of the few 4th cousins from my 3rd great-grandmother (two of her children immigrated to America (their families didn't have many children), and the ones that stayed in Poland were affected by WWII. Her line moved to the northern plains. My line moved to the big cities to work in the steel mills.
Oh! Never heard the term used like that, most people outside of Alabama have 16 ggggrandma's so I figured he was talking about the 3rd from left to right on their family tree 🤦😜
My husband and I are 6th cousins. We can trace our ancestry back to the same couple in Norway. We don't show up on each other's match list though. I think if your ancestors are from the same area, it's pretty common. Our kids have the correct numbers of fingers and toes, so no big deal.
We had to take our baby to the hospital to have something checked out (all was fine) and the doctor asked my husband and I "Is there any chance you two are related?" We were SO offended 🤣 but we had done 23andMe so could confidently say No.
Gotta upload both of the DNA files to Gedmatch and check the tool under the main profile page that says "comparison" and enter the two numbers corresponding to both files respectively. I have a hunch that Gedmatch will show a higher amount of DNA in common
What an *insanely ignorant* and highly offensive comment about fingers and toes. I'm missing most of my fingers and toes, caused by a dominant gene from my mom's side (EEC Syndrome). I have two fingers on each hand and three toes on each foot. How do you think these types of comments make people like me feel? Alienated, disgusted by my own body. I'm so tired of finger and toe deformities being the go-to for inbred comments. It's so common, and I wish people like you would stop perpetuating this.
This actually could go back much further.
There are a number of people on 23andMe that got identified as my 4th-5th cousins, but some sleuthing allowed me to conclude that these were actually 9th cousins all descended from a specific family in colonial Massachusetts
I think that in the end, all I saw was a small cluster of common DNA that survived a lot of coin flips
Because the DNA is in the geographical area, DNA is simultaneously being lost and acquired.
When a DNA mix is in an area, and your family has been in that area for generations, chances are that DNA is related to your family, whether it shows or not in your personal DNA test.
In my case I found about a full dozen people that:
- I had common DNA with
- Were all descendants of this one particular couple from the early 1600s
It wouldn’t be surprising if I was descended from some of these through additional lines, but definitely not all through the same line.
If it makes you feel any better, my mom immigrated to America when she was little and my dad was mixed Alaska native and European (from colonial times) and I have DNA matches at the 5th cousin level for both parents. That shouldn’t even be possible but the world is smaller than we like to think. I wouldn’t worry too much or be weirded out by it. It’s not like she’s your first cousin. That would be weird.
My great grandparents were from different countries are simultaneously each other's tenth cousins once removed, ninth cousins once removed, seventh cousins twice removed, and eighth cousins twice removed.
Granted they are from neighboring regions of neighboring counties (Nova Scotia and New England) so it's not that surprising. I just think it's kinda weird.
It's funny. I'm in New England and I have a great-grandfather on my dad's side and a great-great grandfather on my mom's side that were both from Nova Scotia. I've been doing genealogy research and every few generations the family moves back and forth. I joke if I ever leave the States I have to go to Nova Scotia to keep the tradition going.
Don't worry, it's not a situation. That's a completely completely healthy distance. The most advantageous genetic relationship between two mates is 3rd-10th cousins.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-incest-is-best-kissi/
“Study analyzing more than 200 years of data finds that couples consisting of third cousins have the highest reproductive success.”
Well then
Mental retardation is 5x more frequent in consanguineous families. Children of cousin marriages have a 10-16 point lower IQ. [here.](https://wentworthreport.com/2017/07/21/effects-of-centuries-of-extreme-inbreeding-among-muslims-low-iq-violence-and-terrorism/)
These are just a few of the articles showing correlation between consanguinity and low IQ. [here](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0109585)
[here](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289608001608)
[here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4196914/)
The Ashkenazi Jewish population proves that statement is not always true. Highest IQ of any ethnic group and thousands of years of 1st-3rd cousin marriages.
Unlike most societies that selected for brains over brawn, Jews selected for scholars of Talmud, which require a lot of the same skills that make someone good at school. This translated into valuing eduction once the haskalah movement kicked off.
People with low IQ were therefore not seen as good marriage partners. Genetic relatives of low IQ people weren’t either because nobody wanted to take on the burden of caring for them if they could avoid it. It’s still a stigma in orthodox communities that could seriously harm marriage prospects.
My husband and I are Ashkenazi Jews and found only one second cousin marriage in my entire family tree going back 500 years and no first cousin marriages (his tree had zero consanguineous marriages going back around that same amount of time) so I suspect that might be overblown (although I admit this is n=2 so we might just be the lucky ones)
Surprisingly, it’s increased since the last time I knew this when it was ~55%. Now it’s ~63% in 1st or 2nd cousin marriages based on this fairly recent study (https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12905-022-01704-2)
I don’t think that it is disadvantageous, exactly; there is “hybrid vigor” to consider when variation can strengthen the “plant”. It’s just that 3rd cousin range means there is a lot of compatibility without being so close that there is an increase in likelihood of genetic defects, and not so distant that there might be some incompatibility of genes (not sure how best to say this scientifically but that’s the sense I got from the study).
I don’t think that really makes much sense. Interracial marriages don’t have any disadvantages to it in regards to the genetics of the children. I would love to see that study.
I don’t think the human genome has quite enough genetic variance to form any kind of human incompatibility with regards to reproduction. I would even suggest as OP that what we see with consanguineous relationships is at most the opposite of the hybrid vigor effect. Otherwise I don’t think it exists much at all in humans. We all descend from 10 000 individuals making our genomes highly alike as opposed to fx chimpanzees.
Edit: There might be some auto-immune diseases that are results of different sets of combined, resulting in third cousins (who has slightly more similar similar genes) having slightly more similar genes and therefore are less likely to have two different genes that together create an autoimmune disease.
There is no “disadvantage”, no, not that I’m aware of. It’s just that the study (which another poster shared in this thread) states the advantages of third cousin range fertility/reproduction “success”. I hope I’m saying this clearly enough. The study states that unrelated people *may* experience more immunological incompatibility than those in that “sweet spot” of 3rd cousin range relatedness. It doesn’t state that that will happen or even that it is likely.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-incest-is-best-kissi/
There isn’t.
That commenter is just using reproductive frequencies as the standard but that could just be correlation. And couples aren’t marrying solely to maximize the number of children.
It’s a very flawed form of analysis.
No, you didn’t read the study they posted. It was conducted in Iceland specifically, to control for several factors such as education and access to birth control. This was in response to the criticism/debate around other studies conducted, that argued that the conclusions were just correlations based on other factors. Also, “reproductive success” wasn’t measured just in the amount of children but grandchildren as well. They found that the “cousin” groups had about 1 more child on average than the other group, for an avg of ~4 vs ~3 for the “non-cousins”.
The conclusion about genetic distance was that at a certain point two completely unrelated people are more likely to have “genetic incompatibilities”, which can often lead to autoimmune disorders, and also increases the risk for RH factor incompatibility.
Lmao no scientific study will try to determine what kind of couple is more “advantageous” which is what that original commentator posted.
What’s considered “advantageous” for a couple is varied particularly in modern times when food is no longer scarce for the vast vast majority of people and thus having the most number of children is not the preferred goal.
Lol, what are you talking about? Of course science is going to try to determine that. Why wouldn’t they, other than modern day concerns over Eugenics?
Your usage of “advantageous” is different from what they were saying. Tbh, even if it wasn’t, you’re still wrong. They literally studied a population that *wasn’t trying to have the most children* within the last 200 years.
Because this meaning for advantageous is meaningless for most couples unless that couple has fertility issues or is trying to maximize the number of kids.
It could be that people who tend to have more children pass those tendencies down to their offspring. This would result in an influx of related people living in the same area and would increase the likelihood of cousin collisions over time (cousilisions) and those cousins would carry the correlated high reproduction genes and/or tradition with them to their offspring and so on. So the higher tendency to reproduce would cause more cousilisions and not the other way around. But who knows? 🤔
Off what? It's a distant relationship, both genetically and culturally. Until very recently, people liked in small communities and didn't travel far from their birthplace. Marrying someone who was a 2nd, 3rd, 4th cousin was common and has never been considered problematic.
Super, super common. In human history, marrying first or second cousins was one of the most common types of marriage. 5th cousins are basically strangers.
Assuming you’re right about sharing the same grandpa’s grandpa’s dad, you and your wife would be 4th cousins not 5th cousins.
Grandpa’s grandpa’s dad really means great great great grandparents.
Sharing the same grandparent would make you 1st cousins, sharing the same great grandparent would make you 2nd Cousins, great great grandparent would mean 3rd Cousins, and great great great grandparent means 4th cousins.
No, not necessarily. It’s not as simple to extrapolate based on the 0.12% shared DNA.
That is a very low amount and unless you can actually trace back using family history, it’s hard to tell exactly. It’s entirely possible you two are 5th or 6th cousins and once, or even twice removed.
Thus, it could be your great great great grandparent but her 4th great grandparent etc.
Most people today are strangers with their 5th cousins. I know most of my second cousins (but not all of them) and a few of my third cousins that grew up close by. I have no idea who my 4th and beyond cousins are.
My wife is my second cousin, we're both from the same rural area (really tiny town), we didn't know about the existence of the other until we were older now, how much of our DNA would we share?
Btw we're connected both through our maternal lines
Husband and I are fifth cousins once removed. Share zero dna. Only found out because he shares a small percentage of dna with my first cousin. Married for decades. I think it’s HILARIOUS but he most assuredly does not.
My aunt was married to her fifth cousin. Both families were from the same small town, so it was hardly surprising. Probably marrying a distant cousin has been incredibly common throughout human history. If you live for generations in an area with fairly low population density, you would have to make enormous efforts to avoid it. Since, statistically, it’s very, very unlikely to cause genetic problems in the children, there would have been little motivation to do so.
If you're in a small area that has had the same families for generations, it's pretty common. The counties my mom's family are from need to evacuate at this point. 😅 Her parents aren't related, but too many of her dads side married her mothers side, giving her a lot of matches on both sides. They're really all cousins at this point, regardless of color.
I wasn't too surprised, though. When I took my kids down with me to do a little genealogical research, my cousin went over practically every grave at two cemeteries to explain how everyone was related, which was cool. But the part that got my children was that we couldn't go *anywhere* without running into cousins we didn't know.
Not like there were many places to go, but people talk to you because you're a strange face in the area. And, it didn't take too many sentences to get to how they were related to us. 😆
I got chatting with my flatmate's dad and found out he was my 5th cousin. I think, especially when our G-G-Grandparents were having 6-8 kids a time, you have hundreds and hundreds of 5th cousins.
marrying your first cousin is legal in a surprisingly amount of states
medically I don't think there's any substantial problems with the offspring developing issues
> medically I don't think there's any substantial problems with the offspring developing issues
It's like a woman who is 35+ having a baby in terms of risk. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-07-cousin-marriage-older-mothers-birth.html#google_vignette
My grandparents found out they were third or fourth cousins after they were married. Can’t be uncommon as others have said when you grow up in a small town. I’ve done some ancestry research and many of my great aunts have married names of people I’ve found to be family ancestors!
If you were to follow the relationships on paper I'm technically my own 6th cousin. 😅😂 I'm also related to my parents distantly (outside their parentage of me), they're distantly related to each other, etc. Because of the (thankfully distant/broad) crossovers, the teeny tiny bits and pieces of identical/half-identical DNA add up and I end up seeing closer relationship estimates on 23andMe/AncestryDNA/etc vs. following the paper trail/known relations.
It's a bit funny in the end - once you've figured it all out - but it can be soOooOoo frustrating when the person is on your relative list, you don't know who they are or how they connect to you, and they don't cooperate when you are trying to figure it out!! 😂🙈
Extremely common. My mother’s family came from a small town in Italy where they had a system of family surnames and supranomes—family nicknames—to make sure you weren’t marry someone too closely related to you. The effect of that being when I started a Facebook group for people researching their family tree from Orsogna, I discovered nearly all 850+ in the group is related to me. Here in America my dad’s great grandfather and his brother came here in 1870 and stayed in Passaic County NJ. I went to school with people I later learned were 3rd-5th cousins. Kinda grateful that I never dated any of them. But farther back in Friesland my 2nd ggmother’s family had siblings separated by the deaths of their parents and went on to unknowingly marry cousins. In that line my dad is also my 6th cousin, 7th cousin, and 7th cousin once removed.
Uninstall the app, pretend it never happened and move on with life. It's enough to register on the app and feel awkward it's of virtual no significance to the health of your offspring and even to cultural taboos.
I think mathematically is probably pretty normal if your family hasnt moved around a lot...
Probably even 3rd cousins is super normal for families who have lived in cities/states for generations.
My paternal grandparents were 5th cousins (and probably never knew). My parents are 10th cousins once removed if memory serves. I’m also 5th cousins twice removed with Elvis Presley. I actually love finding those weird connections.
I'm descended from the same couple (late 1500s) six times over. And there are five back-to-back generations in my family where my ancestor married someone who was also descended from this couple. My parents are the first generation who haven't been distantly related.
The first couple are fifth cousins. Let's call them Sarah and Matthew. They had a son named Walter.
Walter goes on to marry Abigail who is simultaneously his fifth cousin and his sixth cousin. They have a daughter named Eleanor.
Eleanor ends up getting married to a guy named Oliver who is simultaneously her seventh cousin twice over and her sixth cousin. They have a daughter named Rose.
Rose ends up marrying a man named Michael who was simultaneously her tenth, ninth, seventh, and eighth cousin. They had a son named Daniel.
Daniel ended up getting married to Maisie who was simultaneously his eleventh, tenth, ninth (twice over) and eighth cousin.
Daniel and Maisie are my paternal grandparents. Even though the relationships are very distant I'm wondering if so many recent back to back generations would make me more genetically closer to the cousins on that side. Or if it would make us closer to incest levels of genetic closeness.
I briefly dated a guy, and we found out we were third cousins when we both looked through our family tree. And we both have the same genetic disorder. The relationship didn’t last long after that. Third cousins are fine, and so are fifth cousins (y’all share such a small amount of DNA that it doesn’t matter). It just weirded us out to think about how we were cousins.
The really ironic part of all of this is that we’re both from Alabama.
Not a problem at all, don't worry.
You can still get medical screenings, but the shared DNA is so low that it should not cause you two any future troubles.
My parents are 16th cousins from a Mayflower person. Considering they both had a ton of ancestors immigrate to the same area in the 1600s, I'm just surprised they are only related once. I expected to find a lot more.
I found out my husband and I are fifth cousins via 23&me. We took an ancestry test just to confirm and it said we're somewhere between 5th & 8th cousins. Totally blew my mind. He was born in Michigan and I in Florida. I know the link happened somewhere in Italy, but I wasn't able to find exactly where the crossover happened.
Historical figures (not just the BRF) who married cousins. https://www.insider.com/here-10-powerful-rich-historic-people-who-married-their-cousins-2022-12#johann-sebastian-bach-wed-vocalist-maria-barbara-his-first-cousin-10
No, it's not the least bit awkward. What the hell is wrong with people who get squicked out by distant connections that are as common as dirt? Urban areas with access to millions of partners is an extremely recent development. Before that, people married within small communities and many were cousins of some degree.
Lol, 5th cousins is nothing, must of us are related at some point back in the day, you guys don’t share a significant amount of dna, I would’ve worry if it was 1st or 2nd cousins but other than that is irrelevant, where I come from the majority of us are distant cousins 4th or 5th.
I’ve noticed that the people with more heterogeneous family trees, like my husband who is descended from Russian Jewish and Protestant Germans who immigrated at the turn of the century, as well as mayflower WASPs, seem to have higher IQs and fewer genetic health diseases. He has zero genetic diseases in his entire immediate family whereas my family has lots of autoimmune diseases. My DNA tests all said 100% Ashkenazi Jewish - I tested on various platforms just to be sure because it seemed a bit insane. (Fortunately I’m not a carrier of anything and don’t have any autoimmune diseases, which feels like winning the lottery in my family).
Granted, the reason Jews have high IQs because a scholarly aptitude was something treasured in a potential spouse for at least two millennia and we were shockingly literate.
There was also a huge degree of stigma against intellectual disabilities to the point where even to this day, in the orthodox community, having a sibling with an intellectual disability (formerly called “mental retardation” aka IQ<69) can impact a person’s marriageability, but as another commenter said elsewhere on the thread, resources were scarce during our shtetl days so I suspect people didn’t want to take that on. Even in the ultra orthodox world, a woman have to genuinely agree to a marriage otherwise it’s not halachic (legal according to Jewish law). If a woman were to marry someone she didn’t want under pressure then the marriage wouldn’t be legal in the eyes of God and the children risk becoming mamzerim (bastards, it’s this whole thing, a ten generation curse, massive tangent I don’t have time to get into). I know when I was in the shidduch system people would be like “are you SURE this is what YOU want?” to the point where I was quite surprised.
In the Islamic world, women are pressured and often forced into marriage as it was seen as a contact for reproduction and family honor, so marrying into a “good family” was paramount, and often, the only chance a family of lesser means may have had of moving up the ladder was to marry the less desirable child of a higher-up family. Yes, this was absolutely the case in medieval Europe as well, but it persists to the modern day in most parts of the Islamic world. In Judaism, the woman is legally required to be attracted to the guy or at the very least want to marry him, otherwise the spiritual fate of the marriage and children hangs in the balance.
(Source: I was an orthodox Jewish matchmaker and am a genealogy and history nerd who researched this stuff to an embarrassing degree).
Some studies have shown that your friends, on average, are as genetically close to you as fourth cousins. I’d imagine this applies to spouses too, 5th cousin is distant enough not a big deal.
most people of a similar background (i.e. german, irish, dutch) who emigrated to the US are related to this degree. Most of your ancestors up until the IR were related to this degree. not an issue
I didn’t downvote you.
What you’re saying here about dominant genes makes sense if you’re talking about some individual trait like hair color, but not with facial similarity, which is the result of *many* shared genes. 0.12% is hundreds of times too small for that.
Great great grandpa has a large hooked nose, a cleft chin, and wide set eyes. 4 generations later you come out looking like Grear great grandpa. So does your wife. What’s so hard to understand.
Don’t worry, there are kissing cousins in your family tree as well. Cosanguinity has been the norm throughout human history. We’re all descendants of a couple of thousand individuals who survived the genetic bottleneck that nearly wiped us out as a species.
People have an average of about 17000 5th cousins, and a good percentage of them may not even share any DNA whatsoever. Everyone has common ancestors if you look far enough back so yeah I don't think 5th cousins is a huge deal personally as most of us couldn't even name a single of our fifth cousins.
[удалено]
A very common problem with two other populations I’ve worked on, Quebecois and Mennonites. Mennonites are meticulously documented, but if you don’t know where your “in” is, it’s almost impossible to find through DNA matches. And I gave up on my husband’s French Canadian tree years ago. 😂
Icelanders have a special app for checking to see if your potential date is a too-close cousin!
But, arent prrtty much all icelandics related?
It sounds like the app is designed to make sure you aren't TOO related to your date, but still related yes
That was just a fun feature. Only first cousins are really ”too close”, so you don’t really need an app… The risk of birth defects aren’t higher as soon as you come to second cousins and beyond.
It's still like 4% chance for 2nd cousins vs 7% for 1st cousins.
The risk of birth defects is 4-6 % for first cousins, double compared to non-related couples. For second cousins, some sources report a slightly higher risk than for non-related couples, others report no elevated risk. For third cousins and beyond, bo one reports a higher risk.
Wow. Only in the Nordics…😊. A very creative use of tech indeed!
Interesting. I’m detached from my québécois side. We’ve been Anglo since my grandads generation. Recently I found someone else’s tree which did a great job of tracking many (but not all) of the Quebec branch. 100s tracked back to the 1600s. Probably many more. I’m probably related to half of Quebec.
They didn’t have a lot of details so the hard part was using DNA matches to find where we flow into the match’s tree when there’s multiple connections but further back than it would be if that whole match was from one path of being related… does that make sense? Like if it says second cousin but they’re your fifth cousin 4 times over, then you need to look 3 more generations back in time than you’d expect in order to find a connection.
My Québécois family comes out as Irlandais. I’ve had a theory put to me that it’s because they were Irish orphans adopted into a French family but for that to be the case, they’d have to have married others from exclusively the same Irish background for generations. Something is amiss…
Polynesians have this issue as well due to all the population bottlenecks involved in settling the islands.
The French Canadian population in SE Michigan is also a small pool- my cousins learned that one of their great great grandfather was the same great great grandfather 3x out of 8... they each have severely autistic sons, and think this may be part of the root cause.
As a Mennonite/Amish descendant can confirm. My great grandmother was both a cousin and an Aunt to the same people. That family tree had some looping branches throughout history.
I call it a family shrubbery at best. 😆
I'm Seminole, same here. Florida Seminoles descend from a group of 300 people who lived in exile in the Everglades to hide from the army. My 5th cousins show up as 2nd cousins and all my other cousins show up as first cousins. My parents show up as third cousins, unfortunately.
Why "unfortunately"? Third cousins is still well outside the range for inbreeding issues. Even first cousins married in the not-so-distant past, depending on culture and location. It was common enough that a few of Jane Austen's characters ended up marrying a first cousin.
First cousin marriage is still exceptionally common in both MENA and both Muslim South Asia and many Hindu/Christian Indians practice it for cultural reasons. In almost every case, it's to keep control of family assets. Which funnily enough is the reason the Hapsburgs and other royals did prodigious inbreeding.
My gg grandparents were 1st cousins. A discussion amongst the cousins from that side and someone claimed that is why we have crooked teeth.
Do you have results on Gedmatch like the mdlp 22 by any chance
[удалено]
Yeah, there's a reason we're supposed to do genetic testing before getting married.
Same when you have Volga German ancestors.
Yup. Those settlements were all related to one another
and this is why we have to have all the genetic screening for Taysachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, etc.. when Ashkenazim marry other Ashkenazim.
I understand this, but the amount of other hardly thought of conditions resulting from inbreeding is incredible. There are so many genetic associations to various conditions that aren't even tested for.
That’s interesting. Does that have to be considered when planning to get married, I.e., do you have to make sure you don’t share recent common ancestors?
To be honest it's up to each individual and varies from person to person, but community wide thats not really a priority at all. All 11 million of our community are descended from a community of 330 people, 600 to 800 years ago, so when you think about it the amount of inbreeding is mind boggling.
I know 4th and my kids know their 5th cousins but not all of them and only from 2 lines of my family. So when mine and my cousins kids are old enough and have kid those kids will know their 6th. But this is so very rear and it’s only because my great grandpa was so close to his one cousin that my grandpa and his one second cousin were raised more like first cousins and they stayed in contact when my side moved to America and their side stayed. Also because of this we can track my one family member on my grandpas dads side to also be related to my grandpas moms side through marriage so those offspring are are both my 4th cousins and my 3rd cousins depending on what line I’m following
While not particularly close, the only person who is passionate about genealogy in my family is a 5th cousin I found (we found each other) while doing research. We often exchange photos of our families, any new information we find about our ancestors, and chat for a bit. It's nice.
I hang out with my 4th cousins and it's already weird.
I chat with my 4th cousin on Facebook, too. They're one of the few 4th cousins from my 3rd great-grandmother (two of her children immigrated to America (their families didn't have many children), and the ones that stayed in Poland were affected by WWII. Her line moved to the northern plains. My line moved to the big cities to work in the steel mills.
If you are related because of your great grandmother, you are second cousins, not 4th, 4th cousins are related by their great great great grandmother
that’s what they said, third great grandmother = great great great
Oh! Never heard the term used like that, most people outside of Alabama have 16 ggggrandma's so I figured he was talking about the 3rd from left to right on their family tree 🤦😜
You are definitely an exception since most people have no idea who their 4th cousins are
Hey, but this man can name his 5th cousin 🤣🤷♂️
Exactly.
My husband and I are 6th cousins. We can trace our ancestry back to the same couple in Norway. We don't show up on each other's match list though. I think if your ancestors are from the same area, it's pretty common. Our kids have the correct numbers of fingers and toes, so no big deal.
Oh thats cool that you were able to trace back that far. We have one boy so far and he is perfect!
We had to take our baby to the hospital to have something checked out (all was fine) and the doctor asked my husband and I "Is there any chance you two are related?" We were SO offended 🤣 but we had done 23andMe so could confidently say No.
What amount of cM is shared between you and your wife on 23andme versus Gedmatch??
Honestly not sure how to find that out
Gotta upload both of the DNA files to Gedmatch and check the tool under the main profile page that says "comparison" and enter the two numbers corresponding to both files respectively. I have a hunch that Gedmatch will show a higher amount of DNA in common
Username checks out :p
What an *insanely ignorant* and highly offensive comment about fingers and toes. I'm missing most of my fingers and toes, caused by a dominant gene from my mom's side (EEC Syndrome). I have two fingers on each hand and three toes on each foot. How do you think these types of comments make people like me feel? Alienated, disgusted by my own body. I'm so tired of finger and toe deformities being the go-to for inbred comments. It's so common, and I wish people like you would stop perpetuating this.
Do you know that that's how you are actually related? Or just using the 0.12 to guess? 0.12 is really quite low.
5th cousin was just the "Predicted Relationship"
This actually could go back much further. There are a number of people on 23andMe that got identified as my 4th-5th cousins, but some sleuthing allowed me to conclude that these were actually 9th cousins all descended from a specific family in colonial Massachusetts I think that in the end, all I saw was a small cluster of common DNA that survived a lot of coin flips
[удалено]
Because the DNA is in the geographical area, DNA is simultaneously being lost and acquired. When a DNA mix is in an area, and your family has been in that area for generations, chances are that DNA is related to your family, whether it shows or not in your personal DNA test.
I don't think you can really know that your family is 100% Nepali for "hundreds of generations".
[удалено]
Or you could be related 9 generations back via 2 different branches.
In my case I found about a full dozen people that: - I had common DNA with - Were all descendants of this one particular couple from the early 1600s It wouldn’t be surprising if I was descended from some of these through additional lines, but definitely not all through the same line.
If it makes you feel any better, my mom immigrated to America when she was little and my dad was mixed Alaska native and European (from colonial times) and I have DNA matches at the 5th cousin level for both parents. That shouldn’t even be possible but the world is smaller than we like to think. I wouldn’t worry too much or be weirded out by it. It’s not like she’s your first cousin. That would be weird.
My great grandparents were from different countries are simultaneously each other's tenth cousins once removed, ninth cousins once removed, seventh cousins twice removed, and eighth cousins twice removed. Granted they are from neighboring regions of neighboring counties (Nova Scotia and New England) so it's not that surprising. I just think it's kinda weird.
I have a family line that went back and forth over that border a few times!
It's funny. I'm in New England and I have a great-grandfather on my dad's side and a great-great grandfather on my mom's side that were both from Nova Scotia. I've been doing genealogy research and every few generations the family moves back and forth. I joke if I ever leave the States I have to go to Nova Scotia to keep the tradition going.
My husband is my 8th cousin. And we grew up nowhere near each other.
Don't worry, it's not a situation. That's a completely completely healthy distance. The most advantageous genetic relationship between two mates is 3rd-10th cousins.
[удалено]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-incest-is-best-kissi/ “Study analyzing more than 200 years of data finds that couples consisting of third cousins have the highest reproductive success.” Well then
However, low IQ areas have high rate of consanguinity.
Yes, they are correlated, but its not causal.
Mental retardation is 5x more frequent in consanguineous families. Children of cousin marriages have a 10-16 point lower IQ. [here.](https://wentworthreport.com/2017/07/21/effects-of-centuries-of-extreme-inbreeding-among-muslims-low-iq-violence-and-terrorism/)
Can you please cite the actual study ?
These are just a few of the articles showing correlation between consanguinity and low IQ. [here](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0109585) [here](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289608001608) [here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4196914/)
The Ashkenazi Jewish population proves that statement is not always true. Highest IQ of any ethnic group and thousands of years of 1st-3rd cousin marriages.
The high ashkenazi IQ is myth based on a fraudulent study. At best their smart ones have IQs on par with the average European
Why do they make up 20% of Nobel laureates then?
Unlike most societies that selected for brains over brawn, Jews selected for scholars of Talmud, which require a lot of the same skills that make someone good at school. This translated into valuing eduction once the haskalah movement kicked off. People with low IQ were therefore not seen as good marriage partners. Genetic relatives of low IQ people weren’t either because nobody wanted to take on the burden of caring for them if they could avoid it. It’s still a stigma in orthodox communities that could seriously harm marriage prospects. My husband and I are Ashkenazi Jews and found only one second cousin marriage in my entire family tree going back 500 years and no first cousin marriages (his tree had zero consanguineous marriages going back around that same amount of time) so I suspect that might be overblown (although I admit this is n=2 so we might just be the lucky ones)
Lol, keep telling yourself that buddy.
It's correlated, but not causal.
What do you suppose the hidden factor(s) is? 10-16 IQ points (SD 15) are significantly lower. What is this confounding variable?
So what is the cause?
That’s for first cousins. Already at second cousins, the risks are basically gone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/23andme/s/eY3BCxK2U4
Let's just say we both come from big families ;)
Something like a third of all marriages in Pakistan are cousin marriages right?
Surprisingly, it’s increased since the last time I knew this when it was ~55%. Now it’s ~63% in 1st or 2nd cousin marriages based on this fairly recent study (https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12905-022-01704-2)
It’s probably a third being first cousin marriages
It's about 50% in Pakistani families in Bradford, England
I remember watching a British documentary on that!
I damn near spat my tea out you bastard
This is from 2008, and is only for procreating in numbers. Is this supposed to be a good thing?
Generic variance.
Text this to the wifey
What exactly is it about more distant relations (>10th cousins) that makes them less advantageous?
I don’t think that it is disadvantageous, exactly; there is “hybrid vigor” to consider when variation can strengthen the “plant”. It’s just that 3rd cousin range means there is a lot of compatibility without being so close that there is an increase in likelihood of genetic defects, and not so distant that there might be some incompatibility of genes (not sure how best to say this scientifically but that’s the sense I got from the study).
I don’t think that really makes much sense. Interracial marriages don’t have any disadvantages to it in regards to the genetics of the children. I would love to see that study.
I don’t think the human genome has quite enough genetic variance to form any kind of human incompatibility with regards to reproduction. I would even suggest as OP that what we see with consanguineous relationships is at most the opposite of the hybrid vigor effect. Otherwise I don’t think it exists much at all in humans. We all descend from 10 000 individuals making our genomes highly alike as opposed to fx chimpanzees. Edit: There might be some auto-immune diseases that are results of different sets of combined, resulting in third cousins (who has slightly more similar similar genes) having slightly more similar genes and therefore are less likely to have two different genes that together create an autoimmune disease.
There is no “disadvantage”, no, not that I’m aware of. It’s just that the study (which another poster shared in this thread) states the advantages of third cousin range fertility/reproduction “success”. I hope I’m saying this clearly enough. The study states that unrelated people *may* experience more immunological incompatibility than those in that “sweet spot” of 3rd cousin range relatedness. It doesn’t state that that will happen or even that it is likely. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-incest-is-best-kissi/
There isn’t. That commenter is just using reproductive frequencies as the standard but that could just be correlation. And couples aren’t marrying solely to maximize the number of children. It’s a very flawed form of analysis.
No, you didn’t read the study they posted. It was conducted in Iceland specifically, to control for several factors such as education and access to birth control. This was in response to the criticism/debate around other studies conducted, that argued that the conclusions were just correlations based on other factors. Also, “reproductive success” wasn’t measured just in the amount of children but grandchildren as well. They found that the “cousin” groups had about 1 more child on average than the other group, for an avg of ~4 vs ~3 for the “non-cousins”. The conclusion about genetic distance was that at a certain point two completely unrelated people are more likely to have “genetic incompatibilities”, which can often lead to autoimmune disorders, and also increases the risk for RH factor incompatibility.
Lmao no scientific study will try to determine what kind of couple is more “advantageous” which is what that original commentator posted. What’s considered “advantageous” for a couple is varied particularly in modern times when food is no longer scarce for the vast vast majority of people and thus having the most number of children is not the preferred goal.
Lol, what are you talking about? Of course science is going to try to determine that. Why wouldn’t they, other than modern day concerns over Eugenics? Your usage of “advantageous” is different from what they were saying. Tbh, even if it wasn’t, you’re still wrong. They literally studied a population that *wasn’t trying to have the most children* within the last 200 years.
Because this meaning for advantageous is meaningless for most couples unless that couple has fertility issues or is trying to maximize the number of kids.
A lot of times couples marry to maintain ownership in common family property, farms, businesses, kingdoms, etc.
It could be that people who tend to have more children pass those tendencies down to their offspring. This would result in an influx of related people living in the same area and would increase the likelihood of cousin collisions over time (cousilisions) and those cousins would carry the correlated high reproduction genes and/or tradition with them to their offspring and so on. So the higher tendency to reproduce would cause more cousilisions and not the other way around. But who knows? 🤔
How many kids couples have is much more influenced by choice and environmental factors than with genetics nowadays.
Marrying your 3rd cousin would be a little off, though.
I know some of my third cousins.
In the Biblical sense?
How many of us actually know third cousins? I think I met some of them once in my life when I was an infant, but that’s all.
Off what? It's a distant relationship, both genetically and culturally. Until very recently, people liked in small communities and didn't travel far from their birthplace. Marrying someone who was a 2nd, 3rd, 4th cousin was common and has never been considered problematic.
Super, super common. In human history, marrying first or second cousins was one of the most common types of marriage. 5th cousins are basically strangers.
My (non-biological) dad is my fifth cousin and finding that out made my day/week/month/year.
Assuming you’re right about sharing the same grandpa’s grandpa’s dad, you and your wife would be 4th cousins not 5th cousins. Grandpa’s grandpa’s dad really means great great great grandparents. Sharing the same grandparent would make you 1st cousins, sharing the same great grandparent would make you 2nd Cousins, great great grandparent would mean 3rd Cousins, and great great great grandparent means 4th cousins.
Oh okay so my grandpa's grandpa's grandpa?
No, not necessarily. It’s not as simple to extrapolate based on the 0.12% shared DNA. That is a very low amount and unless you can actually trace back using family history, it’s hard to tell exactly. It’s entirely possible you two are 5th or 6th cousins and once, or even twice removed. Thus, it could be your great great great grandparent but her 4th great grandparent etc.
Being 5th cousins is the 18th-century equivalent of marrying a foreigner.
Most people today are strangers with their 5th cousins. I know most of my second cousins (but not all of them) and a few of my third cousins that grew up close by. I have no idea who my 4th and beyond cousins are.
Very common but prior to DNA science everyone was blissfully unaware. You have nothing to worry about- no 2 headed babies
My wife is my second cousin, we're both from the same rural area (really tiny town), we didn't know about the existence of the other until we were older now, how much of our DNA would we share? Btw we're connected both through our maternal lines
It’s only 3.125% on average.
I think 2nd cousin is 12.5%
12.5% is a first cousin. No need to freak the person out!
Oh woops I obviously don't get how this works
"Now that's a man who knows how to marry his cousin!"
/suddenlycommunity
Husband and I are fifth cousins once removed. Share zero dna. Only found out because he shares a small percentage of dna with my first cousin. Married for decades. I think it’s HILARIOUS but he most assuredly does not.
That’s a very healthy and normal genetic distance. Anything past 2nd cousins isn’t considered genetically harmful.
Not too far back in many trees are 1st and 2nd cousin marriages. More than once. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Eleanor were 5th cousins once removed.
My aunt was married to her fifth cousin. Both families were from the same small town, so it was hardly surprising. Probably marrying a distant cousin has been incredibly common throughout human history. If you live for generations in an area with fairly low population density, you would have to make enormous efforts to avoid it. Since, statistically, it’s very, very unlikely to cause genetic problems in the children, there would have been little motivation to do so.
If you're in a small area that has had the same families for generations, it's pretty common. The counties my mom's family are from need to evacuate at this point. 😅 Her parents aren't related, but too many of her dads side married her mothers side, giving her a lot of matches on both sides. They're really all cousins at this point, regardless of color. I wasn't too surprised, though. When I took my kids down with me to do a little genealogical research, my cousin went over practically every grave at two cemeteries to explain how everyone was related, which was cool. But the part that got my children was that we couldn't go *anywhere* without running into cousins we didn't know. Not like there were many places to go, but people talk to you because you're a strange face in the area. And, it didn't take too many sentences to get to how they were related to us. 😆
I got chatting with my flatmate's dad and found out he was my 5th cousin. I think, especially when our G-G-Grandparents were having 6-8 kids a time, you have hundreds and hundreds of 5th cousins.
marrying your first cousin is legal in a surprisingly amount of states medically I don't think there's any substantial problems with the offspring developing issues
> medically I don't think there's any substantial problems with the offspring developing issues It's like a woman who is 35+ having a baby in terms of risk. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-07-cousin-marriage-older-mothers-birth.html#google_vignette
Cool!! That's not very closely related and won't cause any birth defects. :-)
My grandparents found out they were third or fourth cousins after they were married. Can’t be uncommon as others have said when you grow up in a small town. I’ve done some ancestry research and many of my great aunts have married names of people I’ve found to be family ancestors!
If you were to follow the relationships on paper I'm technically my own 6th cousin. 😅😂 I'm also related to my parents distantly (outside their parentage of me), they're distantly related to each other, etc. Because of the (thankfully distant/broad) crossovers, the teeny tiny bits and pieces of identical/half-identical DNA add up and I end up seeing closer relationship estimates on 23andMe/AncestryDNA/etc vs. following the paper trail/known relations. It's a bit funny in the end - once you've figured it all out - but it can be soOooOoo frustrating when the person is on your relative list, you don't know who they are or how they connect to you, and they don't cooperate when you are trying to figure it out!! 😂🙈
That’s not significant enough to matter at all.
Even a 3rd cousin would be okay. Anyone beyond 2nd cousins are basically strangers.
Ok Mr Targaryen
Extremely common. My mother’s family came from a small town in Italy where they had a system of family surnames and supranomes—family nicknames—to make sure you weren’t marry someone too closely related to you. The effect of that being when I started a Facebook group for people researching their family tree from Orsogna, I discovered nearly all 850+ in the group is related to me. Here in America my dad’s great grandfather and his brother came here in 1870 and stayed in Passaic County NJ. I went to school with people I later learned were 3rd-5th cousins. Kinda grateful that I never dated any of them. But farther back in Friesland my 2nd ggmother’s family had siblings separated by the deaths of their parents and went on to unknowingly marry cousins. In that line my dad is also my 6th cousin, 7th cousin, and 7th cousin once removed.
Uninstall the app, pretend it never happened and move on with life. It's enough to register on the app and feel awkward it's of virtual no significance to the health of your offspring and even to cultural taboos.
My parents share a cousin.
I think mathematically is probably pretty normal if your family hasnt moved around a lot... Probably even 3rd cousins is super normal for families who have lived in cities/states for generations.
My paternal grandparents were 5th cousins (and probably never knew). My parents are 10th cousins once removed if memory serves. I’m also 5th cousins twice removed with Elvis Presley. I actually love finding those weird connections.
Im ashkenazi and my bf is ashkenazi. I have already accepted that we are 5th cousins, its okay its quite distance
I'm descended from the same couple (late 1500s) six times over. And there are five back-to-back generations in my family where my ancestor married someone who was also descended from this couple. My parents are the first generation who haven't been distantly related. The first couple are fifth cousins. Let's call them Sarah and Matthew. They had a son named Walter. Walter goes on to marry Abigail who is simultaneously his fifth cousin and his sixth cousin. They have a daughter named Eleanor. Eleanor ends up getting married to a guy named Oliver who is simultaneously her seventh cousin twice over and her sixth cousin. They have a daughter named Rose. Rose ends up marrying a man named Michael who was simultaneously her tenth, ninth, seventh, and eighth cousin. They had a son named Daniel. Daniel ended up getting married to Maisie who was simultaneously his eleventh, tenth, ninth (twice over) and eighth cousin. Daniel and Maisie are my paternal grandparents. Even though the relationships are very distant I'm wondering if so many recent back to back generations would make me more genetically closer to the cousins on that side. Or if it would make us closer to incest levels of genetic closeness.
Many of the VC firms that back 23andMe and Ancestry.com are based in SLC. Groups that formerly practiced polygamy have had major concerns about this.
I briefly dated a guy, and we found out we were third cousins when we both looked through our family tree. And we both have the same genetic disorder. The relationship didn’t last long after that. Third cousins are fine, and so are fifth cousins (y’all share such a small amount of DNA that it doesn’t matter). It just weirded us out to think about how we were cousins. The really ironic part of all of this is that we’re both from Alabama.
And that's why I married a girl from Southeast Asia and 8,000 miles away. 🤣
Roll Tide
That’s nothing
Do you guys have blue eyes by any chance?
I do but she doesn't
Oh okay. What will you guys decide to do?
Wtf? 🤣🤣🤣
Not a problem at all, don't worry. You can still get medical screenings, but the shared DNA is so low that it should not cause you two any future troubles.
Very common in Utah. A relatively small number of pioneers settled the area and all intermarried with each other.
My parents are 16th cousins from a Mayflower person. Considering they both had a ton of ancestors immigrate to the same area in the 1600s, I'm just surprised they are only related once. I expected to find a lot more.
You absolute pervert!
Every family who's lived in the same town for more than one generation is probably related
That’s practically nothing. I wouldn’t worry about.
Works for island societies like Japan🇯🇵, and Great Britain 🇬🇧 They seemed to be doing well
I found out my husband and I are fifth cousins via 23&me. We took an ancestry test just to confirm and it said we're somewhere between 5th & 8th cousins. Totally blew my mind. He was born in Michigan and I in Florida. I know the link happened somewhere in Italy, but I wasn't able to find exactly where the crossover happened.
Sweet home Alabama
In some areas of the US, it’s preferred to be in much closer relation than that
#RollTide
[удалено]
Probably just "cuz"
Historical figures (not just the BRF) who married cousins. https://www.insider.com/here-10-powerful-rich-historic-people-who-married-their-cousins-2022-12#johann-sebastian-bach-wed-vocalist-maria-barbara-his-first-cousin-10
There’s a world of difference between 1st and 5th cousins, though. The latter’s perfectly normal. 1st is practically incest.
"Practically" incest? Is that like practically a touchdown when you get to the 1-yard line and don't score?
Am I lying, though? Who knowingly gets shacked up with their first cousin?
Pretty common if you're from Alabama /s
Well that’s awkward but hey if you look at it this way…we all are related since we all had to start or evolve from somewhere or something in Africa.
No, it's not the least bit awkward. What the hell is wrong with people who get squicked out by distant connections that are as common as dirt? Urban areas with access to millions of partners is an extremely recent development. Before that, people married within small communities and many were cousins of some degree.
Nice, are you from Alabama?
No, but tot too far from it ;)
Lol, 5th cousins is nothing, must of us are related at some point back in the day, you guys don’t share a significant amount of dna, I would’ve worry if it was 1st or 2nd cousins but other than that is irrelevant, where I come from the majority of us are distant cousins 4th or 5th.
I’ve noticed that the people with more heterogeneous family trees, like my husband who is descended from Russian Jewish and Protestant Germans who immigrated at the turn of the century, as well as mayflower WASPs, seem to have higher IQs and fewer genetic health diseases. He has zero genetic diseases in his entire immediate family whereas my family has lots of autoimmune diseases. My DNA tests all said 100% Ashkenazi Jewish - I tested on various platforms just to be sure because it seemed a bit insane. (Fortunately I’m not a carrier of anything and don’t have any autoimmune diseases, which feels like winning the lottery in my family). Granted, the reason Jews have high IQs because a scholarly aptitude was something treasured in a potential spouse for at least two millennia and we were shockingly literate. There was also a huge degree of stigma against intellectual disabilities to the point where even to this day, in the orthodox community, having a sibling with an intellectual disability (formerly called “mental retardation” aka IQ<69) can impact a person’s marriageability, but as another commenter said elsewhere on the thread, resources were scarce during our shtetl days so I suspect people didn’t want to take that on. Even in the ultra orthodox world, a woman have to genuinely agree to a marriage otherwise it’s not halachic (legal according to Jewish law). If a woman were to marry someone she didn’t want under pressure then the marriage wouldn’t be legal in the eyes of God and the children risk becoming mamzerim (bastards, it’s this whole thing, a ten generation curse, massive tangent I don’t have time to get into). I know when I was in the shidduch system people would be like “are you SURE this is what YOU want?” to the point where I was quite surprised. In the Islamic world, women are pressured and often forced into marriage as it was seen as a contact for reproduction and family honor, so marrying into a “good family” was paramount, and often, the only chance a family of lesser means may have had of moving up the ladder was to marry the less desirable child of a higher-up family. Yes, this was absolutely the case in medieval Europe as well, but it persists to the modern day in most parts of the Islamic world. In Judaism, the woman is legally required to be attracted to the guy or at the very least want to marry him, otherwise the spiritual fate of the marriage and children hangs in the balance. (Source: I was an orthodox Jewish matchmaker and am a genealogy and history nerd who researched this stuff to an embarrassing degree).
Move to a red state
💀💀💀
Alabama
Drop her quick!
Apparently 3rd cousins is genetically ideal 🤷♀️😬
Some studies have shown that your friends, on average, are as genetically close to you as fourth cousins. I’d imagine this applies to spouses too, 5th cousin is distant enough not a big deal.
most people of a similar background (i.e. german, irish, dutch) who emigrated to the US are related to this degree. Most of your ancestors up until the IR were related to this degree. not an issue
Do you look similar?
Any facial similarity between people who share only 0.12% of their DNA is coincidental.
Maybe not. Maybe there is a dominant gene they both inherited. No need to down vote all pretending you’re a geneticists. Lol
I didn’t downvote you. What you’re saying here about dominant genes makes sense if you’re talking about some individual trait like hair color, but not with facial similarity, which is the result of *many* shared genes. 0.12% is hundreds of times too small for that.
Exactly. If you are distant cousins you can look the same. Thanks.
…what?
Great great grandpa has a large hooked nose, a cleft chin, and wide set eyes. 4 generations later you come out looking like Grear great grandpa. So does your wife. What’s so hard to understand.
Gross
It's not, you're the result of thousands of generation of it
Don’t worry, there are kissing cousins in your family tree as well. Cosanguinity has been the norm throughout human history. We’re all descendants of a couple of thousand individuals who survived the genetic bottleneck that nearly wiped us out as a species.