See, I've done genealogy research that tells me that Hilary Clinton is my 10th cousin, 10 times removed, and so is Ronald Reagan. Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Robert Louis Stevenson, Johnny Cash--all distant cousins of mine. So in that sense, I imagine most of my ancestors were cousins.
I do find that the worst instances of repeated close cousin marriages (the braided ficus of family trees) happened when my ancestors were in Britain, or shortly after they arrived in North America. And it was usually the upper crust. In Hawaii, of course, the highest chiefs were expected to marry close relatives, and an early king of Hawaii was very disappointed that in this new missionary scheme of things, he was not allowed to marry his sister.
When I lived on the island of Molokai (population 7,000) finding someone to date who was not a cousin was a major concern for our school population, three-quarters of whom were Native Hawaiian. A friend from Vanuatu confessed that pretty much every native of that island nation of limited population was married to their cousin. A Micronesian man once explained to me that on his island, you could marry your first cousin as long as your parents were brother and sister, not sister and sister or brother and brother.
Now, my Maori friend has to recite her whakapapa (genealogy) every time she meets another Maori and occasionally a Hawaiian, because she had at least symbolic Hawaiian ancestry. And I eventually came to realize that when she referred to her cousins, she was referring to approximately half the population of New Zealand (since she had Pakeha ancestry as well as Maori).
I do find that the worst instances of repeated close cousin marriages (the braided ficus of family trees) happened when my ancestors were in Britain, or shortly after they arrived in North America. And it was usually the upper crust. In Hawaii, of course, the highest chiefs were expected to marry close relatives, and an early king of Hawaii was very disappointed that in this new missionary scheme of things, he was not allowed to marry his sister.
When I lived on the island of Molokai (population 7,000) finding someone to date who was not a cousin was a major concern for our school population, three-quarters of whom were Native Hawaiian. A friend from Vanuatu confessed that pretty much every native of that island nation of limited population was married to their cousin. A Micronesian man once explained to me that on his island, you could marry your first cousin as long as your parents were brother and sister, not sister and sister or brother and brother.
Now, my Maori friend has to recite her whakapapa (genealogy) every time she meets another Maori and occasionally a Hawaiian, because she had at least symbolic Hawaiian ancestry. And I eventually came to realize that when she referred to her cousins, she was referring to approximately half the population of New Zealand (since she had Pakeha ancestry as well as Maori).
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