Kissin' Cousin Marriages
The Much-Married Younkins and Minerds of
Western Pennsylvania
In the opening
scene of the epic film Gone With the Wind,
the ravishing Scarlett O'Hara is being wooed by two lovestruck men on the front porch
of her family home, Tara. One of the men gossips that their mutual friend Ashley Wilkes has become engaged to
Ashley's own cousin, Melanie Hamilton. Scarlett,
of course, is secretly in love with Ashley but has not told anyone about it, and
begins to pout. The suitor, not
understanding Scarlett's disappointment, says that "The Wilkes and Hamiltons
always marry their own cousins."
Sound familiar? Many Minerd-Miner-Minor relatives married their own cousins too! Especially those in the Younkin and Harbaugh families.
Later in the film, Scarlett confronts Ashley and demands to know why he is marrying Melanie. He responds, "She is like me, part of my blood, and we understand each other."
Ashley's comments offer insights about why many Minerd-Miner-Minor descendants married their cousins in Western Pennsylvania in the 19th century. Although marriages of first cousins today are illegal, they were commonplace then, especially in rural communities where clusters of families lived of the same ethnic background and cultures. The author of this article is descended from one such marriage -- Henry Minerd (1809-1890) who married his mother's first cousin, Polly Younkin (1815-1886).
Today, the
popular image of cousin marriages is of illiterate, hormone-happy mountain hicks
whose cross-eyed children had six fingers on each hand and webbing between their
toes.
But people of the 1800s had no knowledge of modern genetic research (which became a recognized science in the early 1900s), nor were there laws to prohibit intra-family unions. In fact, cousin marriages were considered to have value as a way to ensure that like-minded couples with similar values and heritage stayed together.
It may be surprising to learn that President Thomas Jefferson urged both of his daughters to wed cousins. In Dawn Brodie's biography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait, she writes: "Jefferson encouraged his daughters to 'marry within the family.' Martha married her distant cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph ... [and] Maria married John Eppes, the son of her mother's half sister. Jefferson's younger brother Randolph married his first cousin, Anne Jefferson Lewis. Today it all looks fairly incestuous, but no one then seems to have been in the least troubled by the inbreeding."
To learn more about these early Minerd-Younkin marriages, visit their biographies on our site:
-
Henry and Polly (Younkin) Minerd (1830s)
Click here for the Younkin DNA study webpage
Read about the First
Younkin National Home-Coming Reunion in 1934,
involving Minerd-Miner-Minor, Harbaugh and Younkin cousins
connected through the intermingled
families.
Originally published in the Younkin
Family News Bulletin.
Copyright
© 1993, 2000, 2002, 2006 Mark A. Miner