Secrets and Skeletons

[PabloC]

In previous generations (in my family at least) information seems to have been distributed on a need to know basis, and the norm was You didn't! My grandmother's family according to her were deeply moral, upright and religious. What have I found? First born children seem to appear on average after around 6 1/2 months of marriage! One of my great grandfathers was an alcoholic, but the entire family was teatotal! But the classic is there was a marriage outside the permitted bounds in 1900, marrying his deceased wife's aunt! My grandmother would have supposedly have been appalled, but there is one problem. She appears as a witness to the wedding!! A similar marriage a few generations further back means that I am in fact my own 4th cousin.

Ha....fantastic Redroger. Love the revelation that your Grandmother was actually a witness at said marriage. Brilliant. 

[Redroger]

looking into that side of the tree I found another where early in the 19th century, a woman obviously wanted a "toy boy" so she married a man 16 years younger than herself. unfortunately she was his mother's sister! Seems to have been a tradition, the vicar must have known, it was a small rural village.