When did marrying a cousin become socially unacceptable?

[LionBird]

I'm a big Agatha Christie fan and noticed there are quite a few references to cousins being in a relationship. I'm rereading Taken at the Flood currently, which is set in 1946, and the main character is engaged to her cousin and nobody seems to think it's strange! Obviously it was quite common in royal circles too in the 19th century but post-WW2 isn't that long ago so I'm not sure how and when it became unacceptable to have a relationship with a cousin - can anyone shed some light on this?

I got the impression in the Christie plots that cousin marriage was a lot to do with snobbery. In Taken At The Flood the family were the local well to do land owners so Lyn had to marry someone of the same social standing from a very small pool, hence the engagement to Roly.

I suppose it also kept assets “in the family” for female offspring when it was rarer for girls/women to inherit and to an extent they would “leave” a family on marriage and join another.

And it keeps the pool of characters fairly small, the family being the personification of a locked room.

DD only has one cousin and they look almost identical and could easily be mistaken for siblings. The idea is absolutely gross to me!

yes I have always wondered about identical twins, if their offspring married surely its more of a DNA match, be more like siblings I think, urghghggghhhhh

@RedToothBrush yes. Direct to consumer DNA testing shows me that an ex boyfriend & a few close friends are distantly related to me. There’s a statistic that shows your friendship group is more likely to be distantly related to you.

I've met my third cousin through doing my research.

Our common ancestors was born in the 1840s.

What has staggered me is the extent to which there are similar traits and values shared in both families, despite there being about 130 years between the families diverging as the siblings went off and had their own families.

These are clearly a product of both genetics and upbringing.

It doesn't remotely surprise me, that even with the extent that people move around now, (and indeed then) you are actually socialising in a much narrower pool of people than you perhaps realise AND combined with the population of the UK being 18 million in 1840, this isn't as surprising as you might think when you consider how many people have crossed paths in the time since.

Yes, what surprised me a little was my friendship group were not all rooted in the same area as me but here we were related via various distant ancestors.

In Taken At The Flood the family were the local well to do land owners so Lyn had to marry someone of the same social standing from a very small pool

As I recall, she'd been serving in the WRNS. She'd have met a lot of men and could have chosen to marry any one of them if she'd wanted to.

Wasn't a major plot point of Taken at the Flood the fact that someone didn't marry "someone of the same social standing from a very small pool"?

I knew an Italian couple who were first cousins. From a small village (so pretty much everyone related anyhow).

this was an arranged marriage. They had a child who had serious disabilities and sadly died before she was 7 months old. The grandparents knew the risks but insisted they marry for family honour (ie the wife had been going off the rails - ie feisty and independent).

Divorced now but both harbour an extreme amount of hurt.

Well my in my Italian husband’s family (Roman Catholic) there was a cousin marriage. Perfectly legal and the church was happy to marry them.

I think that's why mixed race people are genetically healthier. Makes sense, diversify the gene pool, take different immunities built up from different countries. Not based in science but my own pondering about identity.

Dynastic marriages among European royal families became a bit problematic two or three generations down the line. I’m convinced the Stuarts had their share of genetic problems.

I don't think the Stuarts were particularly inbred at all, probably less so than the average person, as they had wide-ranging international marriages.

Neither James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II or Anne married relatives (you might find relatives if you went back far enough, but that's true of most people who marry someone from their own country). William III and Mary II were first cousins; they had no children though, so did not contribute to the line of the family.

Pre-Stuart, Mary I and Philip II of Spain were cousins (again, no kids), taking advantage of the fact that cousin marriage was decriminalized when England broke from the Catholic church in the 1540s. Before that, cousin marriage was rare even among royalty in Christian Europe, as the medieval church banned it, although it was possible to pay large sums of dispensation and get round the rules if you really wanted to.

Royalty marrying known relatives became more common in the 18th century, because Great Britain now had laws banning members of the royal family from marrying Catholics, so there was quite a limited choice of spouses for British royals.

Historically, I don't know if royalty has actually been more inbred than the average person. Yes, they have more limited ranges of families to marry from, but they also had the option of marrying from much further afield in geographical terms than most people, so the two things probably cancelled each other out.

Predictably, social media is full of silly attempted "gotcha" takes - "How can you say cousin marriage should be illegal? Don't you know Queen Victoria married her cousin"?

Uh.....and? We know she did. The royal family absolutely does not engage in cousin marriage nowadays (if anything, the younger generation of modern European royals including UK royals are becoming unusually outbred, since royalty mostly does not marry other royalty these days, and modern European royals actually go in for quite international marriages). If anyone in a modern royal family did marry a cousin, we'd all think it was weird and gross. Queen Vic married in something like 1840. Even then, only around 3% of British marriages were to cousins - not 50% or more, which is what we've seen in some British Asian communities.

I think people believe that this is a clever "Gotcha!" because they imagine that most people who think we should ban cousin marriage are deeply socially conservative types who hero-worship the royal family.

Whereas actually, most people in the UK oppose cousin marriage, and do so mostly because it conflicts with the norms of a modern liberal society, because of genetic risks if there are several generations of cousin marriages, and because it's associated with dodgy immigration practices that are used cynically to ship in poorly educated and low skilled family members. I'm an immigrant myself, but this type of migration is in nobody's favor and should be stopped.

Watch the Dispatches documentary’When cousins marry’ - it’ll answer your question!

You might find this interesting- seems pretty clear that inbreeding of European royal families was a problem

www.news-medical.net/news/20191202/Inbreeding-between-royalty-led-to-facial-defects.aspx

Sure, we all know it was a major issues in particular families like the Habsburgs (who had constant first cousin and even uncle-niece marriages for dynastic reasons - they were trying to hold together a massive sprawling empire).

However, other royal families of Europe were probably similar in consanguinity to their own populations of commoners (who mostly didn't marry known cousins, but in a lot of cases probably ended up marrying very distant cousins).

Even today, the "average" British couple are apparently between 6th and 7th cousins. It was probably somewhat closer hundreds of years ago.

I don't think the Stuarts were particularly inbred at all, probably less so than the average person, as they had wide-ranging international marriages.
Neither James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II or Anne married relatives

James VI's parents Mary and Lord Darnley were second cousins.

Today in Parliament, Independent MP Iqbal Mohamed spoke against the Bill which seeks to ban marriage between cousins. He suggested “advanced genetic test screening” is made available to prospective couples. He made the point that it keeps families and communities together.

Random factoid. The parents of Toulouse Lautrec were cousins and that was blamed for his mis-shaped legs and his early death.

Well, it certainly keeps families together!

The Royals were always a bit fucked up. Thankfully that practice isn’t used anymore we’re a couple of centuries on.

Not sure where you got that British couples are 6th 7th cousins from but even if it was true they still don’t produce disabled children through genetic inbreeding.

It’s almost as if you’re justifying it. Odd.

There is literally no excuse for it in today’s society. It needs to be made illegal to protect future children coming to harm

Most likely because it’s a drain on the NHS and DWP

I can’t see the government giving two shits about the women being forced to marry

Children from first cousin unions have roughly the same likelihood of genetic issues as other marriages. However, the next generation, who tend to also marry first cousins, have much higher likelihood of abnormalities. This increases as the generations descend.
The genetic illness wards are heart breaking, and noticeably populated with Pakistani children, there as a direct result of first cousin marriages.
The British Royal family are also interesting and, obviously, the Hapsburgs.

Why do you think Tories don't care about forced marriages?

Why all these generalisations about "the evil Tories"? The Tory party criminalised forced marriages.