Genealogy Chat

Hi Peter, I was interested in your question and the replies you've received but it made me wonder what will happen with our generation of 2nd/3rd marriages, partnerships, half brothers/half sisters. What if sometime in the future they get together and marry without knowing their true family history. Scary or what! Pat

Pat That has happened throughout history - second, third and fourth marriages are nothing new, and neither are 'unknown' fathers, multiple relationships etc. Nothing to worry about - the human race manages to go on! OC

Thanks for that OC. I hadn't thought that an urban/slum environment could have been responsible for the fertility drop. But you could be right - it was certainly when my maternal grandparents went to London from Wiltshire. Mind you, they had ten children and it was those children that seemed to suffer with the fertility problems despite marrying 'outsiders' as it were. Yes, I certainly wouldn't believe the contraception theory either. Given that sheeps intestines 'did the job' in those days it would have been far more likely that country-dwelling people would use them! They were very costly to buy once you got to the city - and very few would have been able to afford them, even had they been aware of them. Now if there had been a World War....... As for genetic problems, I am given to believe that one of the major causes of genetic glitches is old eggs and/or old sperm - and Queen Victoria's elderly father was the cause of the haemophilia that afflicted some of her male descendants. Victoria

As I understand it before most of us can remember the Romans had fertility problems which moder boffins (some) put down to the use of lead in drinking and eating utensils. If my memory serves me right moves into towns in the 1880s coincided with the use of lead pipes for water supply. Is there a connection? As a kid once we were on piped water we were always told to drink only from the kitchen sink tap (OK, we could use cups but the water had to to come from that tap) because it was the only one in the house not supplied by a lead pipe. C

Getting away from cousins marrying, I think the funniest thing I have is where my 2 x great grandfather married for the second time. They had a grandchild living with them(from first wife) and she married, and after grandad died, his second wife, married the father of the granddaughter's husband. He was a lot younger than her. Talk about keep it in the family.

Clive Yes, I am sure lead water pipes did their bit! Another possible reason which occurs to me - my rural ancestors, all farmers, would have had an unlimited supply of fresh, healthy food, with a varied diet including meat and fresh vegetables. Once in the Cities, many poor people adopted a diet of unrelieved stodge such as bread and potatoes, with little meat and or veg, and not fresh when they could get it. Most cheap foods were highly adulterated anyway. A diet high in carbohydrate does have a negative effect on fertility (and it also turns you into a dumbed down, obedient sheep!) OC

In the next door village (3 miles away) to where I grew up the vicar kept a register up to the 1960s of who had married whom in the village as there was so much in-breeding and a high % of people were affected with Downs syndrome - which goes back to masking the defective gene as previous threads have alluded to. There was a lot of 'in fighting' as well but wobetide any outsider who spoke ill of somebody from the village as you were bound to be talking to a relative and then the ranks were closed! Bo

The following is from ASK: Inbreeeding is a problem especially if you are to have children with a very close relative. The closer you are to a particular relative, the worst your chances are of having a very defective child. The reason being is that every human being usually has a unique set of genes and out of all of these genes, many may be defective. But, as human genetics permits such defects since we usually carry each gene in pairs, even if we have a defective gene (say from our dad) we may still be well off because we have a perfect gene from the mother. (I used to live in a highly ethnic area, where 1st cousins were marrying on a regular basis, as had their parents AND grandparents. Health visitors were trying to warn about the dangers, and there were some children from the more orthodox families who had disabilities.)

Only certain types of Downs Syndrome are hereditary. Most are spontaneous and occur at conception - a blip in reading the DNA, not a fault in the DNA itself. The ones which are hereditary, can more properly be said to 'run in families', as it would seem that it is an inherited fault which makes the genes wrongly read the information at the time of conception, rather than just a random misreading. I wonder if that Vicar ever DID anything with his findings, though? How interesting. All cases of Huntington's, a terrible inherited diease, can be traced back to one woman who lived in Sussex (from memory) in the early 1600s, and emigrated to USA. Every case documented so far by medical genealogists is traced back to her and her sister - the sister was hung as a witch, due no doubt to the terrible grimacing and dancing around, poor soul. Huntington's appears to be a random repeating of part of a gene which has no known purpose. If the random repeats are less than, I think, 45, then the person is a carrier and not a sufferer. But where close kin marry, who both have this gene, then the repeats escalate and the child is a sufferer, rather than just a carrier. Sorry! I get carried away with this! OC