General Chat

Way back with my ancestors I have discovered that husband and wife had the same surname before marriage. A first for me :-D :-D

In my family history, a great aunt married a first cousin once removed and so they both shared their surname before and after marriage. he was 15 years older as from the previous generation!

Were your ancestors already related ZZzzz?

No they weren't, just coincidental.Still trying to get my head round it. :-D

Not my ancestors, but an elderly couple who lived nearby when I was quite young were called Nelson (long since died). More recently they reappeared through a local history blog. I looked them up, and her maiden name was Nelson too. I mentioned this on the blog, but apparently she was from another Nelson family, not that far away.

You can understand it with common names, I have a Wilson family in my ancestry, and Miss Wilson married the schoolmaster Mr Wilson who lived next door. Folk on here have helped me wrestle with them, I think they might have been related.

My great grandfather and great grandmother had the same surname before they were married. He was from a family in Northwich who had been there since at least 1700 and she was from County Cork in Ireland

Have found the same thing on a distant branch of my tree. Fortunately their marriage certificate could be viewed online giving their fathers' names so I could work out how they were connected before the marriage.

My maternal grandmother had the same surname before marrying maternal Grandfather. The Church of England, apparently, (no proof) did a check to see if they were related, and if so how close (think it's called ??sanguinity??) maybe someone can confirm sanguinity?

No kin ship found at time, and none that i have found - yet

Consanguinity is the degree of kinship. The Roman Catholic Church in particular was very keen on the observation of this, the C of E less so, I think. There was a thread on this some years back. Someone said that the RC Church requirement was for no closer than 7 degrees, so the couple would need to have a really good knowledge of their family tree going back many generations. And I suppose that in a remote village where lots of folk were related, it might be difficult to avoid relationships with closer kin.

I used to sit in Church as a child and read the table, it was in the Book of Common Prayer, I was fascinated as to why someone would want to marry an uncle or whoever.
I have a lot of intermarrying in the family way back, I tried to read up once but it was explained in terms of racehorses and I lost the plot.

I found and bumped the thread, it's in Genealogy chat, don't know how to do a linky.

Copied from 'The Peerage'

Consanguinity Index (Cumulative Inbreeding Coefficient)

Throughout the database, I show a Consanguinity Index (more correctly referred to as Wright’s Equation or a Cumulative Inbreeding Coefficient) for individuals where this is greater than zero. This is a measure of how much the parents of the individual are related to each other, and therefore how inbreed that individual is. In theory this index ranges from zero (completely unrelated) to close to one (parents are the same person). In practice this measure is maxed out at around 0.28 where an individual’s parents were uncle and niece (evidently a common practice among the medieval Spanish royalty).

Thanks Granny, interesting reading.
Like you, (but I'd forgotten) the table in common book of prayer and looked at at Church/Sunday school

This thread has reminded me of an interview a Suffolk newspaper had with my gran's great aunt Harriett, on her 100th birthday, in April 1936.

Harriett was born in Heveningham, was in service in Dennington, married at Rendlesham, and lived at Middleton - but never went to Ipswich! The newspaper wrote down what Harriett had to say, in her own dialect:

"Then in my young days, it wor rare fur the children tew gew away, but now, there’s no accounting wher they’ll be as sune as they leave schule. We used tew marry one another until the whool village wur divided atween two or three families, But thet aint accounted roight tew-day; but, there, I never see’d anything amiss in thet; though I must say as how most villages had their idiots. But I hev heerd as how madness hasn’t been whooly stamped out , enen in London!"

Some became politicians :-D

Allan! :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D

...so true :-S

Seriously though, I once worked for the NHS Audiology dept, and we had a large proportion of Pakistani children with hearing loss, apparently due to intermarriage.

Apparently, haemophilia B is common within the European royal families.
The condition was once known as "the royal disease".