Shepards and Rounds
A two-for-one development - and a lesson in Endogamy
Harriet Jenevereth "Hattie" Shepard (1874–1923) was the paternal grandmother of Merilyn Martin, my wife’s maternal grandmother - and thus, one of “Her Sixteen.”
Hattie was born on 18 Dec 1874, the youngest of three children of Sylvanus S Shepard (1850–1921) and Lucy Gertrude Rounds (1848–1920). Her family moved from Clay, Onondaga County, New York, to Council Bluffs, Pottawattamie County, Iowa, around 1880, when she was 6 years old.
The Rounds and Shepard families appear to have lived in the same communities for several generations, first in Bristol County, Rhode Island, then in Onondaga County, New York. As is common in small communities, some endogamy should be expected:
en·dog·a·my /enˈdäɡəmē/ - noun Anthropology
In this case, Sylvanus and Lucy were 2nd cousins through the Rounds side of the family.
This information was found on FamilySearch and a lot of work needs to be done to verify it before I am comfortable putting profiles on WikiTree. But for now, it looks accurate.1
A tiny bit of Googling tells me, “In the United States, second cousins are legally allowed to marry in every state. However, marriage between first cousins is legal in only about half of the American states.”2 And Wikipedia has a handy chart for looking at the DNA implications - note that 2nd cousins share only about 3% of their DNA:
What I find more interesting than marriage between 2nd cousins is the persistence of names. Not only are there two Daniels and two Comforts, but notice that Lucy gave her mother’s unusual name, Jenevereth, to her daughter. And I won’t say more out of respect for the privacy of living people, but I do know that one of my wife’s 2nd cousins inherited the name, as well!
One other thing I noticed in the FamilySearch tree was that they show the Rounds family extending back several more generations in Rhode Island and descending (in part) from the Bowen family that my William Bowen descended from. Again - I need to do a lot of work to confirm the links in between, but what they have there suggests that my wife and I are 10th cousins! (Please don’t tell her - she is revolted by the idea of cousin marriage.)
But it just serves to reinforce my tagline: We’re all cousins if you go back far enough!
There is a lot of data to parse from the book, “The John Round family of Swansea and Rehoboth, Massachusetts : the first six/seven generations” on FamilySearch (Comfort Sr. is on page 147).
The Tech Interactive, Can you marry a second cousin? What about a first cousin or half sibling?, October 16, 2019.
Quite the pedigree collapse you found there! The genetic risk of deleterious gene expression in siblings doubles from 2% to 4% which is still very small. The risk with regards to 1st cousins is very small, and to 2nd cousins virtually non-existent. The well known cases of bad gene expressions occur when cousin marriage is repeated over many generations.