I'm having sex with my cousin.

[Kyle]

My wife and I got onto a new ancestry-like site and discovered we're ninth-cousins once removed. Meaning our great, great, great, etc. grandparents are the same people.

Interestingly, I am also ninth cousins once removed with Walt Disney. You'd think I wouldn't have to get Disney+ with commercials, but I guess I'm the black sheep of the Disney family.

[Mando]

I think you qualify as an honorary Alabamian

[Kyle]

I mean... I've lived in Alabama a couple of times in my life.

[Mike]

And West Virginia.

[Kyle]

And West Virginia.

When I lived in West Virginia for 10 months, I discovered that West Virginians are very sensitive to the "cousin-fucking" jokes. And would point out that West Virginia is one of the few states where it was illegal to marry your cousin or half-cousin. Apparently they hear this a lot.

But as I looked into it before posting this, I discovered it is legal in West Virginia to cohabitate and have sexual relations with your first cousin (at least according to Wikipedia). So.... ewww.

[Kyle]

Also- in reviewing the wikipedia chart it says that in North Carolina you're allowed to marry your first cousin "except in the rare case of double first cousins." So then I had to look up what a "double first cousin" is, because I've never heard that term before. It turns out that double first cousins are cousins that share both sets of grandparents. This bent my mind for a bit. But I guess if my mom's sister had a kid with my dad's brother, then their child would be my double first cousin. Is that right?

[DMDarcs]

[Mike]

Yes, double cousins are exactly as you describe. My wife's grandparents had siblings that also married (Grandpa's brother married Grandma's sister). One couple had seven kids. The other had eight. So my mother-in-law has a whole passel of double cousins.

Genetically, double cousins are as closely related as siblings.

[Mando]

I found out while doing some genealogical digging that my great grandfather and his brother married the "Cathey" sisters. I have not found any cousin marriages, but that's a real case where there were some double cousins existing but hopefully not married.

[Tahlvin]

I have at least one case in my family tree of two brothers from one family marrying two sisters from another family, as well as at least one case of a brother marrying his brother's widow. But you have to go back to the 1800's or earlier to find those cases.

[Phoebe]

One case in distant great-great grandparent generation, of a brother and sister marrying a sister and brother... Probably because they would have had to ride two counties over to find another human in the age range for marriage... It was Sparsely settled by the invaders in those days.

[Mike]

I think you definitely see less double cousins situations nowadays because of the increased range of accessible travel and this broader options. But also, in the last 60ish years we've gotten to the point where the vast majority of couples don't have 6+ kids. You simply have fewer available sibling pairs that could match up with another sibling pair.

[Phoebe]

This is true. Although I wonder how many made it to that age because when you scroll the family history it's like, three babies or children sacrificed to flu or typhus or whatever the problem of the day might have been... Still the family sizes were tremendous in some cases! It's not like prenatal and birthing care is so spectacular these days but it's so much better... I shudder to imagine birthing 11 children back in the day. One of my kids is dating the middle most child of a very large family and they keep trying to set up my middle child with their next youngest child... The argument given in his favor is he is wholesome and the number one student in his very large competitive high school class. And that does track with me but I wonder if I'm a bad person, because the parents and the oldest son are full maga and I worry that something might be wrong over there that will reach the second generation. I'm trying to keep an open mind. We love this one kid and I amaze myself by consistently being on his team whenever there's a disagreement - I can't help it, he's always right compared to the other friends or cousins or whoever is causing the problem. But I keep hearing these discussions about how young men today are still breaking for Trump while the young women are solidly in for Harris, So sometimes the men have to be deceptive about their true feelings... I don't think that's happening in this case but there's always a layer of worry. It's really champion level worry.