Incestry.com

Many years ago - so many I don't remember, but well before I had children - my father's mother sent me a package in the mail that contained a complete set of generation charts my Aunt had labored on for years. My father died when I was three so she thought I should have them. I remember opening it and looking at the first page and seeing my mothers, fathers and my names on it, contemplating the rest and closing it again.

That was the last time I really thought about it except to move it with me until I came home from work one day and my 20-something year old son had the sheets spread all over the living room. They were draped across the couch and all over the floor to the point where you couldn't walk through. Mitchell started talking as soon as I walked in about finding this in our things in my closet while he was looking for pictures. I'd never seen him so excited, so I curbed my initial reaction and talked to him about it.

He said he got bored and went to look for something to do when he found the orange box the charts were shipped in. He went through them and discovered we were related to a governor from the colonial ages so he wanted to follow the line. In the meantime he spread evrything out but was having trouble lining everyone back up, so we did that. It gave us a great opportunity to find out a lot about my father's side of the family, and that day he signed up at Ancestry.com.

At first he just plugged in everyone in the charts, which was quite an effort - there are at least a hundred pages, each one containing four generations, or sixty people. Of course they start giving you hints based on other people's trees so we bought a membership and he traced all those down, which added more and more people to our tree. I came home one day and I knew something was up because Mitchell started talking to me as soon as I came in the door about finding a line to royalty.

I enjoyed his excitement, but I was more than a little reserved in my feelings. One the one hand, how likely was it really that I was related to royal and noble people? Our family was as far from that as you could imagine - so far, in fact, that looking back I've realized we were the ones they called "white trash". On the other hand, did I even want to be related to such snobby folks? Some of them didn't have the nicest histories. However, for his sake, I tried to keep an open mind as he showed me what he'd found.

To my surprise, he was right on target! So I allowed myself to digest it as fact and eventually became reconciled with being a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. As interesting as it was, we began to want to look at my mothers side, and were able to slowly find relatives I didn't know or remember by adding in the ones I did. We'd gotten several generations filled in pretty well, when I noticed something peculiar about my great-grandparents' last names - they were the same! I almost got sick when we looked at their parents and found out they had been siblings. In other words, my granny's parents had been 'kissing cousins' and beyond...

Now, it wasn't anything new to us - the royal and noble families were -and remain to be- rife with it. But to think it was that close? Never had I ever! Now I understood why my granny (or anyone else in that family) had never spoke much of her parents. I was able now to view her actions through a new filter, and realize that some things she has told me either weren't quite true or my memory was wrong. Regardless, it helped me see our family in a different way, by knowing their past.

Of course, it still makes me feel a little sick when I see close family members or their parents with the same last names, and as a rule they turn out to be closely related. But having worked on our tree this long, and having close to 3,600 people in it, we've concluded it couldn't have been just our families. So if you find rampant incest in your family tree, rest assured you aren't alone. We're literally all in this together!