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Finding out Spouses are Cousins, many times removed!

Finding out Spouses are Cousins, many times removed!

Posted: 13 Jan 2014 2:45AM GMT
Classification: Query
I’d love to hear from those of you who have found out through your DNA or family trees that you and your spouse or significant other are really cousins! I first noticed in our tree that we had ancestors back in Virginia in the early 1700’s that had the same surname as my son-in-law’s mother had in her family tree. Sure enough, we found a common ancestor. Even though my daughter never met her future husband until years after college, they are 8th cousins, according to the "Genealogy Relationship Chart" to be found on About.com at:

http://genealogy.about.com/library/nrelationshipchart.htm

Recently, a match to my husband’s DNA test had a name that was very familiar to me; it was an ancestor from my own tree! Since my husband’s family was Irish and emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1800’s, and my own family had come to the American colonies in the 1500’s and 1600’s, it seemed incredible that we might have a common ancestor! My ancestor is my 9th great- grandfather, born in Ireland or England in 1580. We haven’t been able to trace my husband’s Irish ancestors back any farther than his third great-grandfather, born about 1751 in Cork, Ireland. I think this would make my husband and myself at least 10th cousins!

Has anyone else found such a relationship? I guess this may occur several times in families that have lived in the same geographical area for generations.

Re: Finding out Spouses are Cousins, many times removed!

Posted: 13 Jan 2014 5:12AM GMT
Classification: Query
My husband and I are anywhere from 7th to 10th cousins, or more. We don't have a paper trail, just a couple shared segments of DNA. This is pretty common among Ashkenazi Jews, as we tend to mostly all match each other. Any endogenous group will see a lot of unrelated relations.

Cyndi

Re: Finding out Spouses are Cousins, many times removed!

Posted: 13 Jan 2014 5:37AM GMT
Classification: Query
I gave up counting all the ancestors my sister and her husband share when I got into double digits. French Canadians who eventually wound up in Michigan are a rather homogeneous group.

Re: Finding out Spouses are Cousins, many times removed!

Posted: 20 Jan 2014 2:54PM GMT
Classification: Query
My parents are related to each other 3 different ways (that I know). All at the 8th-10th range. Now that I am finding out more information on my paternal line (there is an adoption in the 1870s that a YDNA test might have broken a brick wall) there is the possibility for a 4th relationship since the surname possibility is also an ancestor of my mother.

However, none of it is showing up as a major DNA match -- my mother and my paternal uncle (my father is deceased) do not share much in common at all, other than a few bits of small segments. (By the way, this is not something you can get/see here through Ancestry. You need to get your raw data to another site that allows you to do chromosome mapping to see this).

When I was much younger I was fascinated by the number of ways my maternal great-grandparents were related. Something like a dozen different 6th-8th cousin relationships between them. This is what can happen in long-standing communities (New England in this case). Too bad that there is no way for me to get a look at their DNA to see how much overlap they had.

Also, I have the nickname of "Cousin finder" among my friends, since I have found out that I am distantly related to almost all of them in some way. All because I have mapped out most of my ancestors to 12th-14th generation, and deep colonial roots. But very few of them show any sort of DNA connection (at least among my friends who have done testing).

--Elizabeth

Re: Finding out Spouses are Cousins, many times removed!

Posted: 22 Nov 2014 10:59AM GMT
Classification: Query
Not really my spouse but I discovered two of my friends are in fact distant cousins - one much farther than the other.

After discovering a friend of mine was half Puerto Rican I decided to ask some questions.
D. Young Perdomo is a mutual friend through my best friend/HS classmate S. Aristy.
D. Young Perdomo is a 5th cousin because we share an uncommon name from Puerto Rico, through her mother's father's side, we share a common ancestor who was born around the 1820s.

most recently, I discovered this:
J.A. Monch Zapata and I attended school with S. Aristy and are all friends with D. Young, and J.A's sisters AJ and TS.
JA, TS, and AJ Monch are my 9th cousins once removed; our mutual ancestor was born in the 1650s in Puerto Rico.

It's all relative haha
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