Genealogy Friday: When Families Intermarry

Are you searching for children for an ancestor and wondering where they went?

You may want to try searching the records of neighbors and other family members in the same area.

Families would often intermarry. Sometime multiple siblings or cousins would marry in a family.
Families would often intermarry. Sometime multiple siblings or cousins would marry in a family.

I have a couple of family groups that lived in clusters in an area.

One family shows a lot of intermarrying between our core family and two other families. For instance, three cousins on online married three siblings of another family.

At first those of us researching the group thought there was no connection.  However, as we delved deeper and pulled obituaries and death certificates we began to discover that these families were intermarrying with one another.

Several times one—two—or three siblings would marry from each family.

We even discovered four instances where first or second cousins married.  However, this information proved to be very useful.  We were able to find and positively identify missing children from a core set of parents due to all of this intermarrying.

A well known example of such marriage are the parents of Laura Ingalls Wilder.   Her parents were Charles Ingalls and Caroline Quiner.  Charles had a brother that married Caroline’s sister.  Charles also had a sister that married Caroline’s brother.  So, three Ingalls siblings married three Quiner siblings.  This led to two sets of double first cousins.

So don’t discount those other names in the area that keep popping up.  They may prove to be very useful.

Do you have a lot of families that intermarry?

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