Keith T., a 30 year-old-man, married his cousin seven year ago. In 1998, frustrated by the lack of information for cousins who wanted to marry, he started a Web site, cousincouples.com. Thousands of people have visited the site, he said. It is full of postings from people who have married their cousins or want to, and it highlights famous people who married their first cousins, including Charles Darwin, who, with Emma Wedgwood, had 10 children, all healthy, some brilliant.
Mr. T. asked that his name not be used, because he does business in a small town and fears that he will lose customers if they find out that his wife is also his cousin.
"If someone told me when I was young that I'd marry my cousin I would have said they were crazy," he said. "I thought the idea of marrying your cousin was kind of icky."
But then, as a teenager, he got to know a cousin whom he had hardly seen in childhood, and they fell in love.
Their families, he said, were in "total shock." Relatives said, " `They'll throw you in jail, you'll have defective children,' " Mr. T. recalled. "Those were some of the nicer things they said." When he and his cousin married, they invited only three people to the wedding. They hope to make up for that someday by having a "huge wedding," he said.
Mr. T. said he had read everything he could find about cousin marriages, including an entire book on the subject, "Forbidden Relatives," by Martin Ottenheimer, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University. The subtitle of the book is "The American Myth of Cousin Marriage," and Dr. Ottenheimer heaps criticism on the state marriage laws.
Mr. T. said he was delighted to learn years ago that cousins' risks of birth defects were only slightly higher than those of unrelated people. So the study being published today did not surprise him. But he said he hoped it would convince the rest of the world.
"You can find people in the general population who have a greater risk than first cousins," he said. "It's one of my pet peeves. State laws single out cousins. They shouldn't." He and his wife hope to have children, he said.
Time to look up the ol' family tree...lol