“I Discovered I Was Married to My Cousin While I Was Pregnant”

Real Fix

Credit: SWNS / Marcella Hill  A married couple were astonished to discover they were actually COUSINS.  Marcella and Tage Hill, both 42, were browsing their respective family trees on an ancestry website called Family Search to get ideas for a name for their then-unborn first child.  At first they thought their great great grandma just had the same name - but soon the penny dropped that they were actually related.  Marcella and Tage discovered they had the same great-great-grandma, making them distant - or third - cousins.

Transcript

00:00 How did I find out that me and my husband were related?

00:03 Well, we were pregnant.

00:06 We were pregnant with our first daughter

00:08 and trying to find a name.

00:10 And we figured we would look at some of our family history.

00:14 We were sitting on the couch looking at familysearch.org

00:17 and looking through my grandma's and grandpa's.

00:22 And he pulled out his laptop

00:24 and was also looking through his account.

00:26 And he noticed, oh, that's so funny.

00:28 We have a grandma and grandpa with the same names.

00:32 And we started looking and the lines started being the same,

00:36 like great-grandma, great-great-grandma,

00:38 great-great-great-grand, all the same.

00:40 We looked at it closer, realized my grandpa

00:45 and his grandma are first cousins,

00:50 which would make us third cousins.

00:54 And we just kind of sat there for a second

00:57 trying to figure out, are we supposed to do something

01:00 about this?

01:00 Should we not have gotten,

01:03 what do you do with that information?

01:06 I immediately thought, have we done something wrong?

01:09 Is there going to be something wrong with my child?

01:12 We Googled the effects of third cousins marrying each other

01:17 and having a child.

01:21 And come to find out, if you Google that,

01:24 it says that third cousins are actually producing

01:28 the best gene pool.

01:31 So we're like, great,

01:32 we should probably have millions of babies then.

01:35 We went to a family reunion just this last summer

01:38 and my uncle had put together this long list

01:42 of quiz questions about our family history.

01:46 And we're just going through it.

01:49 No one hardly knows anything,

01:51 but we get to our grandpa Tucker and I realized,

01:56 oh, Tage, honey, this is your grandpa too.

02:00 And I just, the funny thing, I was like,

02:03 oh, I just, I forget that my family reunion is also yours.

02:08 So it's definitely become our best party joke.

02:11 We use it all of the time.

02:13 When we tell people that we are third cousins,

02:16 it's just funny.

02:18 To my friends, neighbors, family,

02:21 everyone just thinks it's hilarious,

02:23 but it does sound funny and it does seem like it needs

02:26 to come with some explanation and understanding.

02:30 So when I shared it on TikTok,

02:33 I was a little worried about what everyone was going to say

02:37 because I've only just shared it to people that love me.

02:40 So yeah, I can see the comments

02:43 and a lot of people are like, what are you doing?

02:45 You should leave.

02:46 I'm best friends with my third cousin.

02:47 That's super awkward.

02:49 But most of the comments are that is nothing.

02:53 Like third cousins have hardly any relation.

02:56 Like you're fine.

02:57 It just sounds ridiculous, honestly.

03:00 It just sounds ridiculous.

03:01 It's not, but the funny thing about it is

03:04 it's not dangerous in any way,

03:06 and it's not really any inappropriate

03:08 or anything like that.

03:09 It just sounds really weird.

03:12 (upbeat music)

03:14 (upbeat music)

03:17 (upbeat music)

03:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Transcript

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