Marriage between siblings?

[ancestryamateur]

I've been building my family on Ancestry's website and came across a branch where a full brother and full sister married each other in the early 1500s. I looked at all available records and cross referenced against other trees they appear in.
It appears true from everything I've been able to gather that this pair of full sibling married and procreated.
Forgive my ignorance and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, I'm genuinely curious: Was sibling marriage allowed in those times? I can't imagine that it was tbh, so this really baffles me.

"Was sibling marriage allowed in those times? I can't imagine that it was tbh, so this really baffles me."

Quite simply, no. Actually I don't think it ever has been. In 1540 under Henry VIII there was a law that basically said that marriages were valid unless prohibited in the bible and before that churches largely went by what the bible said anyway.

Back then that even applied to in-laws as well. So, for example, a widower could not marry his dead wife's sister and a widow could not marry her dead husband's brother. The law on this only changed in the 20th century.

There was a whole big thing around Henry VIII marrying Catherine of Aragon because she was his brother's widow, and a widow could not marry her dead husband's brother.

They got round this by Catherine claiming that the marriage had never been consummated and Pope Julius II either was, or affected to be, credulous and gave a special dispensation allowing them to marry.
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But I'd also like to mention a wider point if that's ok?

"...in the early 1500s. I looked at all available records and cross referenced against other trees they appear in."

The first thing I will say about other people's trees on Ancestry (or anywhere else) is to always double check them. Also, you will find that trees are often just copied from other trees and even if it looks like everybody agrees this may well just be a case of everybody just copying one person.

Then you need to consider what the records actually are. I wonder what records have led people to assume a sibling marriage? There aren't too many records from back then.

Let's say that a marriage says that Thomas X marries Elizabeth X - they both have the same surname.

You also see in the records that there was a Thomas X born there 20 years ago to John X and 19 years ago there was an Elizabeth born there to John X.

So perhaps you assume that this is the same Thomas and Elizabeth who married 20 years later?

That isn't a safe assumption to make at all. Extended families often had the same names, a couple will name their child after a brother/sister or aunt/uncle, and you will see the names being repeated in each generation.

For example, in one branch of my family, between the early 1500s and mid 1600s it was very common to see eg Thomas, son of Thomas and grandson of Thomas. They all had brothers called Nicholas and John. And these brothers all had sons called Thomas, Nicholas and John as well.

Likewise with the daughters, Elizabeth (so many Elizabeths!), Edith and Joan.

And they all lived in nearby villages (or even the same village).

Combine this with the fact that not all records survive, so if you suddenly find a Thomas X marrying in the church, that doesn't mean that he was necessarily the same Thomas X that was baptised there (especially if he's supposedly marrying his sister).

Although, of course, it is likely in most cases that the Thomas X baptised in the church is going to be the same Thomas X that gets married in that church 20-25 years later but it's not always the case.

I think it probably more likely that this was a first cousin marriage or second cousin marriage rather than a sibling marriage.

I have two first cousin marriages (eg John X married Elizabeth X) and two second cousin marriages in my tree in the 1600s and also examples of families intermarrying over the course of several generations.
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Just finally, I suggested always double checking other trees. If you have done a DNA test then this can be a very useful check.

For one branch of my tree going back very early I had to rely on one particular tree based on research done earlier and published in the 1990s. I have since managed to corroborate quite a bit of it, but certainly not all.

However, I have found a number of DNA matches that only make sense if the tree is accurate. This does give me a lot more faith that the tree is accurate. The DNA common ancestors are quite a long way back but there was some endogamy (the same families intermarrying) in both branches.

Basically, one branch of the family went off to America and became tobacco farmers in the 1650s and my branch stayed behind as farm workers.
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So, I would be doubtful if this was an actual sibling marriage.

There's a possibility that they were brought up as siblings but actually one was adopted (think babies out of wedlock at a time when that wasn't allowed)

Brother and sister have never been able to marry. And like the OP says they mostly thought the bible rules were to be followed so no incest (interesting if you think through the cain and Abel story!)

Like Cathy and Heathcliffe! I'd wonder too if there was an error in the entry or as pp said the same names but different people - even if birth dates appear could that be a mix up? - two people with the same name and the wrong one recorded. Interesting...

In those days it was extremely common to have cousins sharing the same names as one another, and there was a much smaller pool of first names to use.

eg: John Smith and his wife Mary live in the same village as John's cousin, also called John Smith and who also happened to marry someone else called Mary.
Imagine the confusion that could emanate from that, especially if both families have children and they both call their first-born son William.
Hundreds of years down the line, how would you be able to tell which set of parents belonged to which William?

Likely cousins, wasn’t unusually for orphaned nieces/nephews to move in with an aunt or uncle.

Would be perfectly acceptable for that child to then marry their cousin (think Moll Flanders’s first husband was her foster brother who she had lived with since she was 3, though not biologically related to her).

An actual legitimate marriage between full siblings, I highly doubt it… though it was once thought children born as a result of incest were rare, commercial DNA testing is sadly showing it is far more common than previously thought ( according to the dna series of “ The Gift” on radio 4!)

There is incest in the Bible. Abraham and Sarah were half brother and sister (same father). Lot fathered children with both his daughters (reportedly without his knowledge).

I agree with Another2Cats post above.
also isthesolution .
Vanishingly unlikely that they were siblings, no church would have married them knowing that and everyone knew everything in small communities.
I struggled to establish which one of three women with the same name, born in the same place at the same time, was my ancestor. A lucky dna match with someone two generations closer to her gave me my answer.

@Another2Cats I have found at least two cases in 19th c (not England/UK) of someone marrying their late spouses sibling so the law you refer to is not universal in European countries. This has been both ways ie man marrying late wife's sister and woman marrying late husband's brother.
I have seen same surname marriages but only cousins. As you say family names are really common so not unusual to have children in the same village with the same name and it's easy to get confused especially if women lost their identity and either weren't mentioned or just known as Mrs John Smith.

I once worked with somebody whose Auntie became her Stepmum. She ended up with half-siblings who were also her cousins.

Her mother died young and her widowed father married his late wife's younger sister.

"...of someone marrying their late spouses sibling"

To be fair, the situation was rather more complicated than I made out. Up until 1835 a close marriage was said to be"voidable". So it could exist up until the Ecclesiastical Court found out about it.

So, if two people within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity or affinity were to marry then the Ecclesiastical Court might later declare that marriage "void" and so any children of the marriage or the surviving spouse may be disinherited.

In the case of eg a widower marrying his dead wife's sister the Ecclesiastical Court would also prosecute him for incest (the wife's sister being counted as his own sister).

The Common Law courts then started intervening in this in the 1600s. An example is the case of Harris v Hicks (1692) 2 Salk 548. Here, a man married his dead wife's sister and they had a child together. This sister then later died and the Ecclesiastical Court sought to void the marriage and so disinherit the child.

The Kings Bench then stepped in and said that the marriage could not be annulled after death. However, they did still let the Ecclesiastical Court prosecute him for "incest" with his sister-in-law.

So close marriages could be voided any time up until death.

The situation changed in 1835 when a new law passed that said any close marriage was automatically void from the outset and not just "voidable" by the Ecclesiastical Court:

"And be it further enacted, That all Marriages which shall hereafter be celebrated between Persons within the prohibited Degrees of Consanguinity or Affinity shall be absolutely null and void to all Intents and Purposes whatsoever."

There were attempts to get this law overturned from the 1870s onwards. An interesting person at this time was Dinah Craik (nee Mulock) who published a number of essays and novels.

Her 1872 novel "Hannah" was all about this issue. She told the stories of three very different young women.

Hannah is a 30 year old governess. Her younger sister has just died in childbirth and her brother-in-law, Bernard, whom Hannah has only met once, invites her to his house as a “dear sister” to help raise the baby. Yet, two unmarried people of the opposite sex living together was seen as scandalous in society, despite their apparent sibling status – a fact referenced by several characters.

By the end of the novel, Hannah and Bernard have fallen in love and they leave England forever to go to France, where such marriages were legal.

The novel also has two separate subplots. The first follows Hannah’s maid who was tricked into marriage by her brother-in-law, James Dixon, after her sister died.

Grace, the maid, is a virtuous but poorly educated woman unaware of the intricacies of the law. When her brother-in-law persuades her to marry him to raise her sister’s children, Grace agrees for the children’s sake not knowing that it makes her own subsequent son illegitimate.

Her argument, that such marriages are common amongst the working class who can’t afford to pay anyone to raise their children except a wife, blinds her to the fact that, though common, these marriages are technically illegal. When Dixon grows tired of her, he abandons Grace and her child, and Grace has no legal recourse to protest this. She is left as a disgraced woman.

It has been argued that this novel influenced much of the publicity that was subsequently used by activists to reform this law.

So, in 1907 the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 was passed which made it legal for a man to marry his dead wife's sister.

But what about the other way round? Well women only got the equivalent right in 1921.

This was due largely in part to the number of men killed in World War One.

However there were also concerns about the cost of war widows pensions and the increasing level of divorces (which were considered a v bad thing at the time).

When it came to war widows pensions, a war widow would get 20 shillings a week and extra for any children. But the pension stopped as soon as she remarried.

There was a financial incentive for the government to pass this bill and so we got the Deceased Brother's Widow's Marriage Act 1921.

[EDIT]

Just to say that the reason why these laws were passed was because so many people were just doing it anyway or wanting to do it.

That’s a brilliant post!

@Another2Cats Thanks for explaining. The Ecclesiastical court is for CofE but the law applied to everyone in England regardless of religion? Strange that other protestant countries had a different law as these couples were legally married.

I'd imagine they were cousins or one sibling adopted or a "ward" of the parents rather than a blood sibling.

"...but the law applied to everyone in England regardless of religion?"

Yes, the Ecclesiastical Court wasn't so much about what religion you were it covered certain aspects of life generally and the civil courts covered other aspects of life.

So whether you were Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Quaker or whatever then your case would come under either of the two different court systems depending on what it involved. Also, from the 1600s onwards the power and authority of the Ecclesiastical Court gradually declined but didn't finally disappear until 1858 (it still exists but only for internal matters of the church).

Much of this centred around moral issues and family issues but it also involved things like licencing surgeons, midwives and teachers. In the 1600s a surgeon might receive an episcopal licence in order set himself up as a physician (there were also other competing licencing bodies, for example in London the College of Physicians claimed sole jurisdiction over all practitioners of physic within a seven-mile radius).

Other areas the court was involved with was slander and defamation until the 1700s. Marriage and the legitimacy of children until the 1800s and finally wills and probate until 1858.

[EDIT]

With the law about close marriages, the English court worked off Leviticus Chapter 18 and Chapter 20 but whether that actually covered the dead wife's sister I have no idea at all

"I struggled to establish which one of three women with the same name, born in the same place at the same time, was my ancestor. A lucky dna match with someone two generations closer to her gave me my answer."

I've had exactly this same issue, except it was the father. Three men with the same name, born within a couple of years of each other. Two were born locally and one was born about twenty miles away.

Although it did turn out that it was the one born twenty miles away that was the actual father.

So, in 1907 the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 was passed which made it legal for a man to marry his dead wife's sister.
But what about the other way round? Well women only got the equivalent right in 1921.

We have a deceased brother's widow who married a deceased sister's widower in my family tree from around 1930. I was deeply confused, not helped by my mother's airy explanation of 'Well, Aunty Madge was Uncle Bob's sister, not his wife, that was Aunty Margery, but when Bob died, Margery married Aunty Madge's Robert.'

Another2cats.. fascinating posts..thank you!!

One would have thought it extremely unlikely that sufficient records from the early 1500's still survive in sufficient quantity or detail to be able to compile any kind of tree from them. The exception being if the people in question are landed gentry or royalty for whom pedigrees exist.

I would take any trees on Ancestry showing information this old with a very large pinch of salt. Besides, most of them have probably been copied wholesale from one another, thus perpetuating any fundamental errors.

This is partly why Gretna was popular for weddings - in Scotland it was never illegal to marry your dead wife's sister. And many people did!

Agree that it was never OK to marry a full sibling and there must be something else going on here. Similar reservations about availability of records in the 16th century, and the quality of other people's trees...