Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 March 10

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March 10

Double cousins

A double cousin is when either a person's father and mother are brother and sister of another person's father and mother respectively (parallel double cousins) or each person's father is a brother of the other person's mother (cross double cousins). Are there any known examples of double cousins? GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 17:48, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Sure, I have some double cousins, as my father's sister is married to my mother's brother. A more remarkable case is that of Chang and Eng Bunker, famous conjoined twins who married two sisters, both of whom had children. - Lindert (talk) 17:57, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Check out this family. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 18:19, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Googling "twins marrying twins" brings up a lot of hits, including one where twins were married to twins by twin priests. Loraof (talk) 19:06, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

They won't all be relevant hits, but searching just inside Wikipedia for double cousin brings up 7,639 hits. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:12, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

So we have anecdotal and famous/notable examples. Our WP coverage of double cousins is at Cousin#Additional_terms. Some related info at Coefficient of relationship which shows that double cousins are as closely related as half-siblings. But 3/4 siblings are even more closely related, Sibling#3.2F4_sibling gives some examples, a famous one involving the Jackson 5. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:10, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

• It happened in royal families all the time; since there was a limited set of people to marry. Doing some searching, I even found some examples of spouses who were double cousins, see Alfonso XI of Castile and Maria of Portugal, Queen of Castile were double first cousins (maybe double half-first cousins, I think they just shared grandfathers), while Francis I of the Two Sicilies and his wife Archduchess Maria Clementina of Austria were true double first cousins: they had all four grandparents in common, as were Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor and his wife Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicily, who had the SAME four grandparents as the Francis of two Sicilies and Maria Clementina. Their kids would have been quadruple second cousins with each other. Wow. --Jayron32 21:19, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

They call it "line breeding" when it's used for prize race horses, but "inbreeding" when it's low class humans. I don't know what they call it for royalty, but pedigree collapse also illustrates some famous double cousins and other close relatives. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:05, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Personal experience, but an interesting slant. My family knows a family with double cousins (brothers married sisters) and this came in very handy when one of the children was diagnosed with a severe illness requiring a bone marrow transplant. His own sister was not a match, but his two double cousins were both perfect matches. Extremely fortuitous for the lad, to say the least. Matt Deres (talk) 17:41, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

For reference, see also cousin marriage. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 11:07, 14 March 2016 (UTC)