Bill Wyman's 1989 marriage

When I saw this in the latest newsletter, it struck me as being the same scenario which inspired the song "I'm my own Grandpa". According to Wikipedia the song was inspired by an anecdote which has appeared regularly in newspapers for over 150 years.

I also have a similar example in my tree to the bit at the start of that paragraph about the pair of marriages, only in my case it was a widow and her son. On 6 Jan 1880, in Wotton under Edge (Gloucestershire), Mary Ann Excell widow (sister of one of my ancestors) married William Hooper widower, while her son Edwin married William Hooper's daughter Elizabeth.

 

Pauline that is quite close to my husband and my situation, before we were married my husband's father died. After we were married my mother died, then my father married my husband's mother and they spent many happy years together.

 

I've never really considered how common this may be, and it means the younger couple become step siblings as well as husband and wife. It happened with my 2 x great grandparents, but as with you, their widowed parents didn't marry the same day as they did.

 

Yes, it's one of those things that has varied over time, but I think it was legal for step siblings to marry until relatively recently. Unless it's changed again more recently still, I think the recent change was to forbid the marriage of step siblings who had been brought up together as siblings.

 

Me too. When I discovered that my 2x great grandparents were step-siblings when they married, I thought it was unusual but, thinking about it, maybe not that uncommon. Her widowed father had married his widowed mother ten years before, when my 2GGs were both aged 14, so they presumably would have lived in the same household for a while (though they weren't together in the census just before their marriage). Their parents went on to have 3 more children, so they each had half-siblings (different 'halves', so to speak). Would the descendants of these half siblings be my full cousins (rather than half-cousins) as we have the two 3x great-grandparents in common, even though descended from different marriages?

Yes, I think you're right. Looking in "Marriage Law for Genealogists" by Rebecca Probert, I can't see any mention of a ban on such marriages, only between step parent and step child, and relatives of deceased spouse.

 

I wonder how such relationships affect the interpretation of DNA matches? Would you expect a DNA result to show a full cousin relationship rather than a half-cousin?

 

That's the kind of question which has the potential to make your brain spin!

I was wondering if they might be double half cousins?

 

So far, I haven't identified any descendants of this couple in my DNA match list (I have several descended from children of the first marriages of each), but I know there were quite a few descendants of at least 2 of the 3 children of the second marriage, so it's possible they may turn up in the future. I do wonder how Ancestry might interpret the relationship in ThruLines.

 

On average, I think we would expect to share the same amount of DNA with a double half cousin as with an ordinary cousin of the same degree.

At first cousin level, both ordinary cousins and double half cousins share two grandparents, the difference being that ordinary cousins share a pair of grandparents, while double half cousins share a grandparent from each side. However, the coefficient of relationship is the same in both cases. Likewise, double half 4th cousins share two 3 x gt grandparents, as do ordinary 4th cousins, just not a matching pair.

So yes, in terms of shared DNA, I think a match with a double half cousin would appear indistinguishable from a full cousin of the same degree.