A Marriage Between Double Cousins

Now and then, I go back through my genealogy database looking for things I’ve missed before. A few weeks ago, I came across a first cousin five times removed, Catharina Mol. All I had on her was her date of birth, March 31, 1776, in Velp (Gelderland). This was surprising since much of the information I had on the Moll’s came from research published by the single-name society Genealogische Vereeniging “Mol(l)” back in the 1930’s. (You can find their publications on-line here.)

Most of their data was fairly complete, so seeing someone with just a date of birth was conspicuous. These days, research is a lot easier, and so it didn’t take long to figure out what happened with her. Catharina moved away from Velp to Echteld, a village about 35km to the east, situated on the Waal. There she married Peter van Beem, a planter. Research on their descendants turned up some interesting interrelationships.

In this drop chart, the people marked in blue are my distant cousins. If you look carefully, you can find three examples of two siblings marrying two siblings. In particular, note the two brothers Lubbartus Mol van Beem (1803-1875) and Peter van Beem (1806-1884) married to the two sisters Aartje van Setten (1816-1875) and Cuinera van Setten (1814-1882).

There are also three examples of marriage between first cousins. This was not uncommon back in those days. However, for the first time in my own research, after recording information on over 13,000 individuals, I found a case of a marriage between first cousins who also happened to be double cousins, Peter van Beem (1832-1901) and Elizabeth van Beem (1852-1901), married in 1890. That is, these two shared four grand-parents. Before this, the closest I got was a case where the bride and groom shared three grand-parents.

These days, laws regarding cousins marrying vary considerably from place to place. According to one web site, North Carolina allows first cousins to marry, but not double first cousins. According to another web site, almost half of all marriages in Afghanistan are cosanguineous. Of those, almost 7% are double cousin marriages.

Anyways, research on this branch of the family continues.

Cheers! Hans