“I Discovered I Was Married to My COUSIN While I Was Pregnant”
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.
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.
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🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00How did I find out that me and my husband were related?
00:04Well, we were pregnant.
00:06We were pregnant with our first daughter and trying to find a name.
00:11And we figured we would look at some of our family history.
00:14We were sitting on the couch looking at familysearch.org
00:18and looking through my grandma's and grandpa's.
00:22And he pulled out his laptop and was also looking through his account.
00:26And he noticed, oh, that's so funny.
00:28We have a grandma and grandpa with the same names.
00:32And we started looking and the lines started being the same.
00:36Like great-grandma, great-great-grandma, great-great-great-grandma, all the same.
00:40We looked at it closer, realized my grandpa and his grandma are first cousins.
00:50Which would make us third cousins.
00:54And we just kind of sat there for a second trying to figure out,
00:58are we supposed to do something about this?
01:01Should we not have gotten...
01:03What do you do with that information?
01:06I immediately thought, have we done something wrong?
01:09Is there going to be something wrong with my child?
01:12We googled the effects of third cousins marrying each other and having a child.
01:21And come to find out, if you google that,
01:24it says that third cousins are actually producing the best gene pool.
01:31So we're like, great, we should probably have millions of babies then.
01:35We went to a family reunion just this last summer.
01:38And my uncle had put together this long list of quiz questions about our family history.
01:46And we're just going through it.
01:49No one hardly knows anything.
01:51But we get to our grandpa Tucker.
01:55And I realize, oh, Tage, honey, this is your grandpa too!
02:01And it's just this funny thing.
02:03I was like, oh, I forget that my family reunion is also yours.
02:09It's definitely become our best party joke.
02:12We use it all of the time.
02:14When we tell people that we are third cousins, it's just funny.
02:19To my friends, neighbors, family, everyone just thinks it's hilarious.
02:23But it does sound funny.
02:25And it does seem like it needs to come with some explanation and understanding.
02:30So when I shared it on TikTok,
02:33I was a little worried about what everyone was going to say
02:37because I've only just shared it to people that love me.
02:40So, yeah, I can see the comments.
02:43And a lot of people are like, what are you doing? You should leave.
02:46I'm best friends with my third cousin. That's super awkward.
02:49But most of the comments are, that is nothing.
02:53Third cousins have hardly any relation. You're fine.
02:57It just sounds ridiculous, honestly.
03:00It just sounds ridiculous.
03:02But the funny thing about it is it's not dangerous in any way.
03:06And it's not really inappropriate or anything like that.
03:09It just sounds really weird.