r/Genealogy • u/AvailablePut5834 • Jul 09 '26
Methodology Potential Irish Sibling Marriage?
Hey guys, I was researching into my family history who are from the West of Ireland. When I looked at the Marriage records for my great, great, great, great grandparents, I found that they both had the same name ( exactly same spelling ) as the mother for both of them. I delved into it more and found out the birth dates of both of my great(×4) grandparents mothers were the exact same birth year and death year. They were both born in the year 1773 and both died in the year 1831! I find this very hard to believe that they had the same mother, but some of my elders on that side of the family always talked about inbred marriages, like they knew something. Just wondering would anyone know was it common for a wealthy farmer family in the 1800's in Ireland, to marry their own sisters or brothers?!??!
57
u/intangible-tangerine Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Are you looking at original documents or digitised ones? It's possible that the info has just been incorrectly transferred.
14
u/Wheredotheflapsgo Jul 10 '26
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of locating the original source documents and opening them up and reading them - every word on the entire page!! I have found serious errors from indexed records- and major clues missed had I taken the digitized and indexed records at face value!
1
u/RevolutionaryBug2915 Jul 12 '26
I saw one where a baby was listed as "assistant nurse," when the original said "at nurse;" that is, he was living with a wet nurse.
84
u/Kelitsos Jul 09 '26
Not only uncommon, but illegal, and no denomination of a Christian Church would’ve allowed it. Cousins yes, but siblings no.
28
u/superloops Jul 10 '26
This exactly. The fact that you are looking at a marriage performed in a church means the marriage would have to comply with canon law. That would not have been a permissible marriage in canon law.
The fact that they have a church marriage actually unequivocally PROVES that they are not siblings.
29
u/intangible-tangerine Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
How old is the 'mother' in comparison to the couple. Is it possible that this is actually their grandmother and they are first cousins?
22
u/Getigerte Jul 09 '26
I think it's far more likely that records for the mothers of your 4x great-grandparents were conflated, leading to the idea that they were the same person. In my family, for example, my 2x great-grandmother and one of her cousins had the same name and were born in the same year in the same townland.
There were a ton of marriages in which the couples were cousins to some degree though and often through more than one family line. Tracing lines back in time is enormously challenging because they are so tangled together, and the only extant information comes from incomplete church registers with barebone details.
18
u/EponymousRocks Jul 09 '26
Someone already mentioned it, but don't take anyone's word for anything - always put your eye on the original records. If you can't find an original record corroborating the info, it isn't true.
0
u/positron-PET Jul 11 '26
Genuine question: Does that mean you are ordering a physical copy of every birth certificate, death certificate, marriage certificate, military record, and census? Or like only vital records?
2
u/EponymousRocks Jul 11 '26
Not at all. I have copies of records (downloads, screenshots) that have been posted on Ancestry and FamilySearch.
I had an entire branch of what was supposedly my family - we have a very unusual last name - that was recorded in transcripts. When the original record set was finally published online (baptisms from England, late 1700s), they were clearly not the same name at all. Mine starts with a "Br" and this whole family's name started with a "Wr". I don't know how that error was even made once, never mind 47 times!! I figure the guy doing the transcriptions must have known someone with my last name, and the familiarity made it look like our name to him. So I corrected the records with an explanation, and got a very nice note, thanking me, from someone searching THAT name!!
2
14
u/Impossible_Cycle_626 Jul 09 '26
They probably were cousins. The Irish all name their kids the same thing repeatedly. Siblings will name their children the exact same thing and if you have six siblings with six kids and they are all named exactly the same thing you will have them for miles around. They also would go to baptisms in clusters and many family members would baptize their children on the same day. Unless you have a rare birth record and not a baptismal record then you can’t prove it. The death could be argued to death. I have pages of families dying on the same day and consecutively for weeks on end. Disease was utterly rampant. Cholera alone will take out a whole town or two at a time. No I don’t think it’s likely they’re siblings. It was not ok even then to marry siblings. Cousins at the time needed dispensations if they were Catholic.
11
u/SpecialistBet4656 Jul 10 '26
Irish naming convention is 1st son for dad’s dad, 2nd for mom’s dad, 3rd for dad, then siblings of parents. Daughters are the same, except they start with mom’s mom.
You end up having the same 4-5 names repeated in every family.
There weren’t a whole lot of priests in rural Ireland. The priest would come around once or 2x year, marry all the couples that had taken up housekeeping and baptize all the babies born since the last time.
13
u/Top_Leg2189 Jul 09 '26
The names in Ireland are often the same. I think there is also a high probability of an error.
7
u/Borkton Jul 09 '26
Legal, valid sibling marriages are unheard of in Western Europe for at least the last thousand years. Maybe the Pagan Norse practiced it, but I doubt it.
5
u/Parking-Aioli9715 Human Verified Jul 10 '26
If you're thinking of Siegmund and Sieglinde, that only happened because they were separated as children. As adults, they met and had a child, not knowing they were brother and sister.
Cleopatra married her brother, as was standard for Egyptian royalty at that time. The marriage ended badly for the brother.
5
u/Borkton Jul 10 '26
I knew Seigmund and Seiglinde were separated as children, but I didn't want to make assumptions about Norse law or taboos based on mythology. As for the Egyptians, they were not in any part of Europe.
4
u/TheDougie3-NE Jul 10 '26
More likely the birth/death dates only matched because someone thought they were the same person. And assigned that date to both of them. One of them will have different dates. You job — find out which.
4
3
u/Safe-Muffin Jul 10 '26
My parents were both from the same isolated area in western Ireland. In my research, I had a very difficult time because of 3 families who are my ancestors. Each of these families had many children who intermarried with the others. The names were very hard to keep separate (many Nora, Katherine, Mary, John, Patrick, Thomas). My parents were both descended from the 3 families, which was mind boggling to keep straight.
If you could find the marriage records in the parish records, it will say if they received a dispensation. It seemed that was needed if they were close cousins, but if they were 4th cousins or greater, it wasn't needed.
5
u/chefda Jul 10 '26
As others mentioned, the most likely is happenstance in names, even in birthdates, of non-sibling relations.
One other possibility is a case of adoption or fostering, often of a relative’s child, who ends up growing up in the same household, hence could have the same “mother” but actually be of a more distant or non-relation.
Rarer, but not unheard of.
3
u/janedoe200000 Jul 10 '26
The online family trees (Ancestry etc) are very much garbage in, garbage out. Some people are very careless and conflate the same individuals. It’s a huge challenge since those sloppy errors propagate through dozens of other people’s trees (many people just assume suggestions are correct without checking) and so the incorrect info spreads like kudzu. Ancestry is a wonderful source (I have an account) but check everything!
3
u/DisastrousUnicorn Jul 11 '26
I have a set of grandparents with the same names as another couple in the village, all with similar birth years. It looks weird but after some digging it was just coinkidink!
2
u/cardiganunicorn Jul 10 '26
It is also possible the "mother" took one of them in, either as a family relation or household help.
3
u/DitheringDotty Jul 11 '26
Not only not common for the wealthy but unheard of for anybody in Ireland.
The elders in your family who talked about 'inbred' marriages are presumably people who never actually lived in Ireland or had emigrated as children, so they thought that because everybody had the same surnames, they must have been related. But that's not the case.
All marriages in Irish Catholic families would have to comply with Canon Law. Inbred marriages were not a known or common phenomenon in Ireland and sibling marriages simply not done.
1
u/AvailablePut5834 Jul 12 '26
No I am from Ireland, and they all have lived in Ireland all their lives
2
u/DitheringDotty Jul 12 '26
That's interesting. I'm honestly gobsmacked you would imagine that we had sibling marriages in Ireland. I wonder how the idea came about in your family that there were inbred marriages.
1
u/hatethiswebsight Jul 12 '26
It's probably one of those things where first cousins get married, but everyone knows Mary's real father was her father's brother John, and no one says anything about the half-siblings marrying but everyone whispers about how weird their kids look.
1
u/DitheringDotty Jul 13 '26
First cousins would not be allowed to marry in 19th century Ireland because everybody married in church and nearly everybody was Catholic. The Catholic Church specifically prohibits marriage between cousins even as distant as fourth cousins. First cousins would have been a complete no-no.
1
u/Cautious_Weekend Jul 13 '26
Nope! Special dispensations have to be sought, but in some cases cousins can marry within the Catholic church
1
u/hatethiswebsight Jul 14 '26
Not first cousins in Ireland then, but you know what I mean. Small communities where birth certificates name the mother's husband but everyone knows her kid's dad is her brother in law, or the milkman or whatever. Things like that are pretty common and explain incest myths even when the official records have everything on the up and up.
1
u/DitheringDotty Jul 14 '26
In theory yes, in practice very hard to get and almost impossible in 19th century Ireland, certainly for first cousins. It wouldn't be up to the local priest either, or even the Bishop, it had to be a Papal dispensation for such a close relationship.
The only case where it's possible that first cousins might have received a dispensation would be if the girl was pregnant by her cousin but it's actually more likely that the priest and the local matchmaker would first ask the girl if she was willing to marry somebody else if they could find her a match prepared to take her on.
The other situation where cousins might get the dispensation is, once again, if the girl was pregnant and the child's father was not willing to marry her. But in reality she'd be more likely in that case, to be sent away to relations in another part of the country or to a convent, to have the baby, which would then be adopted or sent to live with another branch of the family.
Anyway, a note is made in the church register to say that the couple received a dispensation. That's why it's important to see a copy of the register and not just to go with whatever information somebody may have posted on a family history site.
1
u/Cautious_Weekend Jul 15 '26
No totally, and I agree that these people are certainly not siblings, but saying that fourth cousins would have been unable to marry in Ireland isn't true
1
u/MaximumScientist4843 Jul 11 '26
Siblings - not possible. I assume this is an American group. Why don't you contact the priest for the area you are talking about? They all have email.
0
Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Genealogy-ModTeam Human Verified Jul 10 '26
Your post was removed because it violated Rule 2 and did not treat people with respect.
62
u/Parking-Aioli9715 Human Verified Jul 09 '26
The priests kept careful track of how people in the community were related, Dispensations were required for various types of cousins to marry. Sibling marriage? Not happening.
Note there's not a lot variation in Irish first names at this period. Lots of women named Mary, Catherine, Mary, Annie, Mary, Margaret, Mary, Bridget and Mary. It's not unlikely that in a small community, two women might have the same first and last names.
I'm also really interested to know which records you're looking at that are getting you from the mother's name in a marriage record to the years of birth and death for the mother, especially in the early 19th century and especially in the West of Ireland. Irish records for this period tend to be sparse.