Kissin' Cousins

My dad grew up in the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri and he used to tell me some pretty funny jokes about family members marrying each other.  They were just jokes, though, and based on my genealogy research for his side of the family, no one was even remotely related to one another.  We still had some good laughs about the stereotypes of those “hillbillies” down south, where everyone was related.

That whole intermarriage thing isn’t really a joke when it’s true to life, though. No where have I seen family trees looking more like vines than in researching Norwegian family roots - including my mother’s side of our family.  I’ve also helped many friends do research on their Norwegian ancestry and I’ve yet to find a tree that didn’t have some family members marrying each other.  They obviously didn’t get out much.  First and second cousins marrying each other was very common in the old days, but shockingly, it still happens today.  It’s not illegal in Norway for first cousins to marry.  In fact, the parents of the King of Norway himself are first cousins.

The year we lived in Norway we met one of our neighbors – a young guy from California whose mom grew up just down the street from where we lived.  He was living in Norway for a few years just for the fun of it.  As we got to talking we discovered he is related to my husband, Kory, which caused the conversation to turn to how it seems everyone is related to everyone else in that area.  He told us when he meets a woman he’s interested in and asks her on a date, before he ever kisses her, he finds out where her family came from, for that very reason.  Unbeknownst to him, he’d been on a few dates with second cousins and it grossed him out.  He had no desire to become Kissin’ Cousins with anyone.  Coming from America, he has a different view on things than the Norwegians, who think it’s perfectly normal.

Jens, one of Kory’s relatives, married his own second cousin.  Jens didn’t know at the time he started dating her that they were related, but once he found out they had more in common than he initially thought, it didn’t stop their affections.  Jens’ parents were first cousins - so being married to his second cousin didn’t seem so bad to him.  Two of Jens’ great grandparents were siblings and their other sibling was the great grandfather to his wife.  That family tree is a very twisted vine, but all the descendants seems just fine to me – not at all like some of the people we’ve seen running around in the Ozarks.