General Chat

Caught a snippet on the radio yesterday to the effect that , due to us being an island with lots of in-breeding, every in this country is at least your sixth cousin.

Can anyone enlarge on that either factually or fun-wise (I would assume they were excluding our fairly new, non - ethnic population).

Happy days

'Life is sexually transmitted.'

As the Asian community has been established for a couple of generations, they probably could be included!

Once someone has married outside the ethnic community, the longer established 'white' residents are related in some way through the children. ;-)

And I thought that was only my rellies who emigrated to Utah.

:-D

We live at no2.

J and A live at no1.

G and P live at no 3. G is cousin to J at no1. P is cousin to Fred's mate who used to live at no5.

At no6 is Glad and her son M. The grand-daughter of Glad's brother is G at no3.

I had to tell the woman who has bought the cottage at the end of the row to be careful what she said to people.

lol Sharron

Sounds like our town........ we're two of the few who aren't related to everyone else.

When I was growing up in this village I was related to something like sixty people

This dwindled until it was only Fred and two others.

Now it is just me and three others, one whose ancestor left the village at the beginning of the nineteenth century and another whose great-grandfather lived in the village has moved here.

It is like a new infestation beginning.

As this is a reasonable sized island I don't think inbreeding has been more prevalent than anywhere else.

There have been plenty of immigrants over the centuries, it is not a recent phenomenon.

I'm thinking about some old Lanarkshire mining towns.
My sister used to live in one and well... everybody was related to everyone else.

She later remarried a local and the children they had together must be related to about half of the" banjo playing" town!

Ultimately we are all related, those of us with blue eyes are supposedly descended from one person who lived between 6000 and 10000 years ago.

The inbreeding that GlasgowLass mentions would actually make it less likely that we are all sixth cousins, because those pockets of highly related people would not be related to many elsewhere in the island.

The sixth cousin business would mean that everyone shares at least one great great great great great grandparent (you only have 128 of those). To get the sixty million figure every one of those would have to have at least five offspring each of whom produced at least another five.

My ex's dad's family lived in a small hamlet in Hampshire, part of Portal's estate. There is a row of cottages there. When his dad (b1906) was there (and he was there until he was 19) his relatives lived in every one. and had done for years.
They ran the shop, one was a teacher, the others worked for Portal, were ag labs etc.
Ex's dad only left to join the Navy because he 'disgraced' himself - had an affair with an older woman (divorcee), who went on to have a child - and yes, we have found the 'child' 30 years ago. He's 20 years older than ex, now in his 80's (ex's half brother, that is), and are in regular contact!!
Having said that, one would assume there was a bit of 'inbreeding', which there may have been, but Ex's grandmother was from The New Forest, other marriages within the family included people from Liverpool (servants) and Suffolk (casual labour), so it doesn't follow that small hamlets encourage inbreeding!

Oh - and ex's mother was a descendant of Charles Stewart Parnell.

I would think that, the more diverse the relationships, the more likely you are to be related to someone else.

Just reminded myself of my grand daughter's father's family.
They lived for years in the same Hampshire village (now small town) - so much so, that there's a section on their family in the local museum.
They DID have a habit of inbreeding. In fact when g/daughter's dad's father left his first wife - he married his cousin and had a further 2 children.
When daughter first told me, I jokingly asked if they had webbed toes.
His (grand daughter's dad's) cousins did.........

My children are okay - Suffolk, Hampshire, Cornwall, Gloucester my side, and Hampshire, Irish their dads side
:-D

On BBC News Site today is this article about how the European gene pool originated from three tribes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29213892

Many thanks to all who have shown an interest in this thread. some interesting replies.

Best wishes Happy days