"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.  Her grandpa and his grandma were first cousins.  Initially they were worried about the health of their unborn baby, because Marcella was pregnant.  But after getting reassurance there was no risk, they decided to name their daughter after their joint great-great-gran, Mary Jane Dollar.

Transcript

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

00:04 Well, we were pregnant.

00:06 We were pregnant with our first daughter and trying to find a name.

00:11 And we figured we would look at some of our family history.

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

00:18 and looking through my grandma's and grandpa's.

00:22 And he pulled out his laptop and was also looking through his account.

00:26 And he noticed, "Oh, that's so funny. 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," "Great-great-great-grandma," all the same.

00:40 We looked at it closer, realized my grandpa 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 trying to figure out,

00:58 "Are we supposed to do something about this? Should we not have gotten that?

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 and having a child.

01:21 And come to find out, if you Google that, it says that third cousins are actually producing the best gene pool.

01:31 So we're like, "Great! 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 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 realize, "Oh, Tage! Honey, this is your grandpa too!"

02:01 And it's just this funny thing. I was like, "Oh, I forget that my family reunion is also yours."

02:08 It's definitely become our best party joke. We use it all of the time.

02:14 When we tell people that we are third cousins, it's just funny.

02:18 To my friends, neighbors, family, everyone just thinks it's hilarious.

02:23 But it does sound funny, and it does seem like it needs to come with some explanation and understanding.

02:30 So when I shared it on TikTok, 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, and a lot of people are like, "What are you doing? You should leave!"

02:46 "I'm best friends with my third cousin. That's super awkward!"

02:49 But most of the comments are, "That is nothing. Third cousins have hardly any relation. You're fine."

02:57 It just sounds ridiculous, honestly. It just sounds ridiculous.

03:02 The funny thing about it is it's not dangerous in any way, and it's not really inappropriate or anything like that.

03:09 It just sounds really weird.

03:12 [MUSIC]

03:22 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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