Posted by Mr B on 7/12/2009, 6:54 pm, in reply to "Kissing cousins: Studying historic inbreeding in rural English villages"
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Day explains that the region’s Catholics battled competing pressures – to not marry a cousin, but to make sure they married someone of the same faith.
“In the 1780s only one per cent of the British population was Roman Catholic, so their available pool of spouses was very small. It’s interesting that what won out was the pool of available spouses – in their mind they had no choice, and it meant that the Catholics were much more inbred than then Anglicans,” she says.
Then there’s the peculiarly British trait of looking down at people from outside of your area. Regional rivalry is one thing, but Day’s study has shown that people were happier to pick a partner from further away in their own county than go to a closer village that was in another county.
“There’s a very strong sense of belonging to a certain county – even in this day and age.
“When I was living in Wiltshire doing my study I could be talking to someone who lived right on the border to Somerset and they’d tell me how strange Somerset folks were and joke about how funny they sound.
“There’s a clear sense that they see each other as ‘different’ and there’s something intrinsically special about each county.”
Then there are the quirky findings – that the historic two year age gap between British couples, present for hundreds of years, disappears with cousin marriage. Or that cousin marriage is far more common in two social groups – the slightly higher class of farmers and those with criminal convictions.
She’s also had to deal with some interesting reactions to her research. At a meeting of a Stourton local history group she was asked only to discuss the geographical aspects of her study because the other aspects “were too embarrassing to talk about”.
Then there are the people concerned that their family history is being rewritten through her findings.
“A couple of Catholics were concerned that I showed they had Protestant ancestors, and it had always been the family myth that they’d been Catholics since the Reformation.
“I didn’t press the point though, I’m not going to destroy their whole fantasy, particularly if their faith is important to them.”
But if offending local historians and some Catholics wasn’t enough, she’s also had to cope with barbed comments from British academics.
“I’ve had a few people think it’s odd to have an Australian anthropologist studying the British. One person said ‘It’s like having the ant coming to study the entomologist’! He thought it was odd that someone should come from the colonies to study them.
“But mostly the reaction I get is interest – everyone wants to tell me about some place that they say is particularly inbred.”
So just how inbred were the English? Day’s study shows that 2.25 per cent of the marriages in the ‘closed’ parish of Stourton were between first cousins, but the rate was half that for the adjoining ‘open’ village of Kilmington.
But for all the findings, it’s the stories that come up that make Day realise that for all the thousands of records she’s studied, there are plenty of great tales to be told.
Amazingly, one of those stories had a link to her.
On one of her visits to the Wiltshire parish, she stayed with a descendent of the Hoare family, the original owners of the village. Going through the records she saw a familiar name beside an entry from 1812.
“I discovered that Nick Hoare’s ancestor had sent my great great grandfather to jail for stealing chickens.
“It was just one of those funny things – I had no idea he was sent to jail for stealing, I just found it as part of my research. So I demanded an apology from Nick!”
But despite the amusing asides and historical tales she has uncovered, the “elephant in the room” remains. Why is the issue of marriage between cousins so sensitive? And are the fears of deformities borne out by the facts? The answer, Day says, is a matter of perspective.
“The bottom line is that unless you know there is a genetic defect in the family there’s no reason why you shouldn’t marry your cousin.
“Any two people randomly have, roughly, a two per cent chance of having a child that has some kind of genetic abnormality. If first cousins marry then it’s roughly four per cent. So one side says ‘that’s doubling the risk’ while the other says ’96 per cent of people aren’t having a problem’. You can look at it both ways,” she says.
http://news.anu.edu.au/?p=800
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