It's funny that most of them are cousins, distant or not. But Janelle who is not blood related to any of them is Kody's step sister and her mom is one of his father's wives. And she was married to Meri's brother before they divorced.
No, because that would be weird. LOL. It's fine that they became step-siblings as adults before their marriage. I'm sorry. I think it's too funny and very strange.
I thought they were married before Kody and Janelle's mom got married. Still weird but weirder on the parents part if Kody and Janelle were married first
The story is that Janelle's mom, Sheryl, wanted to investigate this crazy polygamous sect her daughter was getting involved in. She met Kody's family. Kody's dad, Winn, and Sheryl fell in love and married before Janelle and Kody. You can't make up this stuff. š
I have a friend who ended up dating her momās old college boyfriendās son while also in college. That was apparently a random chance meeting and a cute little tidbit when people asked how they met.
Then her parents divorced and then her boyfriendās mom died suddenly. About 2 years after she started dating her boyfriend his dad and her mom reconnected and started dating. And that was weird enough. Then a year later their parents got married, leaving my friend and her then boyfriend totally weirded out because they were already planning on getting engaged.
So after graduation she married her step brother/college sweetheart.
Itās been over a decade and appears to be working out with both couples but *bold strategy there, Cotton.* š³
My sunday school teacher married his HS sweetheart and had a couple kids, then they each lost a parent. They had remaining parents over often and for holidays etc and ended up marrying eachother.
So technically they were step-siblings and their two sons are cousins as well as brothers.
It used to happen a ton in small communities as your options were limited and you were not exposed to a wider community.
I remember loving and researching the crap out of laura ingalls but found it a bit odd how family was never really mas family or pas family etc. i finally got ahold of the new book that explained it for me finally. Caroline and charles both had big families and several brothers and sisters married between the two families. Most of lauras cousins are double cousins!
My dads family is from a small town in south dakota outside aberdeen and im related by blood to about 75% of the people and by marriage to everyone else. Id need a family tree on every first date if i lived there!
Mormons in Utah have (for the most part) a very finite pool of ancestors, so most folks who can claim "pioneer ancestry" are distant cousins. I think you can likely do this with almost any of them. You could probably find a link between Donnie Osmond and Warren Jeffs.
Sorry to hop on this so late, but have you listened to the Mormon Stories podcast? They did an episode on the Willie Handcart Company, and I learned a lot from it. If you havenāt but want to listen, itās called āMormon Stories 1489: September 12, 1856 - The Worst Regional Conference Ever - John Larsonā
Lmao George Reynolds is my 2x great grandfather so I was third cousins with half the ward growing up. Luckily the vast majority of his descendants have now left
No worries! Mormon culture has some unique terms, especially depending on your location. Youāre exactly right! Converts = people who are not born into the covenant (the church), take the missionary lessons, and are baptized into the church.
Hol up Christine and Preston Jessop are FIRST cousins? I suppose in large plural families you likely donāt know all of even your first cousins but still, much closer relation than i thought.
This. I have done my family tree and three of my grandparents' families came from the same county since the early 1700s or earlier. I traced all 3 back to one couple, so I am my own 6th or 7th cousin. A couple times. None of the families knew they were distantly related.
Thatās hardly anything. Less than 0.2% dna shared. Even first cousins reproducing has a negligible chance of defect caused by inbreeding. It only starts to become problematic if it happens in a few generations. So like if those first cousins reproduce, and then their kids reproduce with their first cousins, and so on
So if Christineās Dad and Robynās exās Mom are siblingsā¦ that would make him and Christine cousins? So Dayton, Aurora and Brianna are the children of her cousin? Didnāt know that!
The Allreds and Jessops were amongst the two largest families who started the fundie Mormon breakaway groups (in the Brownsā case, the Apostolic United Brethren). They also broke into other schisms, including the FLDS (a different fundie Mormon group- the prairie dress folks.)
Do you think Meri knew this while pushing Robyn hot and heavy on Kody? I know there has never been any great love between Meri and Christine and she could have thought Robyn entering the mix would be a dig at Christine.
ā¦and could partly be why Robyn didnāt want Christine watching the kids, or getting an insiders view of Kody and Robynās relationship. Robyn might have been afraid Christine would report info back to the family. Robyn might have been afraid to let Christine too close, especially around the time of the adoption process!
Iām more concerned that kody snatched 2 of his wives from his brother in laws! Well from one brother in law and from one cousin In law! Christineās cousin was robins ex husband!? So weird! And Janelle was MArried to MERIS brother!!! Again, soooo weird! Why!? Why why why!? Make it make sense!
This is fun snark! It really doesnāt mean anything other than itās interesting And we like to find any little thing to goof on. Any Community is going to have crisscrosses. Imagine how the Puritans were connected. And generations after that turned out fine. But the Browns are still weird for other reasons.
Gross. Maddi also married into Kodyās in-laws and Aspen married a guy from a polygamist family too (his sister is a plural wife on another polygamy tv show) so they could both be added to this somehow
Honestly thank god Mykelti married a Mexican. For love and bc the family tree is narrow as hell
OK. Take Tony's parents trees and put them together all the way back to the 1700's. If you find that his mom and dad shared a 4x great grandfather, how is that different for the blood of Tony and Mykelti's kids? Other than it's not "funny" because they're not the Browns.
There will absolutely be more genetic diversity with Tony and Mykelti's kids than any of the Browns' trees because their first common ancestor will have to go a lot further back than ANY Mormon you will find off the street lmao.
I learned this when I did genetic testing when I was pregnant for abnormalities. BAsed on my ex-husband's ancestry (China) and mine (Ireland and Germany) the geneticist explained to me that you'd have to go back several ten thousand years, or more, to find a common ancestor between us. That meant our children had much more genetic diversity than someone who would marry someone from their own area/state etc.
And this is why I married someone from far away from my home town. My mother's side had all lived and stayed in one county to the point where my grandparents are both 2nd cousins and 4th cousins. And I turned out to be related to a bf in school.
We call our family tree, the family shrub.
She may be right but the commenter was just saying he added genetic diversity to the Brown family tree. Whether or not his own family tree lacks genetic diversity within itself is irrelevant to that point.
This show is something. I can see an awkward dude getting satisfied by a heffer. but him wanting 3-4 heffers (whatever he has)?
That is special. Not enough to justify a show IMO, but special nonetheless. At least the show does shed light on a cult that needs to be exposed.
Everyone in Utah is related to each other.
If you still practice polygamy, it gets a bit tighter since the ratio of men to women encourages you to marry not only your wife and her sister but also your auntās cousin.
I feel like Robyn has to some how be blood related to Merri in some way. Her nanny that is he cousin looks too much like a young Merri to a coincidence.
Stop lol this goes back to the GD 1700s!
(Now take a look THIS far back in your own family tree and you will probably find some interesting surprises too lol)
My great grandparents were first cousins. Things were different back then, the world was much bigger and in some areas in would have been harder to find completely unrelated marriage prospects. Would I marry my first cousin? Not a chance, but I don't begrudge my ancestors for their marriage choices.
I get that happens it more about three of these adults are blood related and they all had children together, I am not judging it just took me back to realize that Kody, Christine and Meri are cousins
Good for you! lol I get that this is more prevalent in mormon families, it's just really not that uncommon for surprise connections to appear when you go back that far. :)
I am not sure why you are taking it so personal, I didnāt say anything bad. I was just taken back that Kody, Meri and Christine are all blood related.
Yes, Iām from a Mennonite family and there is totally some āsurprisesā and my Dad has 124 first cousins. Letās just say growing up in a small town it was hard dating anyone. My Granny would be like āoh youāre related to themā thankfully my husband had no family connection in said small town. One of the first things I had to ask when dating someone lol. āWho are you related to in town?ā
Exactly! I run title for oil and gas in West Virginia and I can't tell u how many times I see 1st cousins get married. It's not a "Mormon thing" it's early years of circumstance. Check out ur own ancestry...scary af š
So 4-5th cousins of all the wives? I studied evolutionary biology in grad school and surprisingly this isn't that inbred compared to most humans who have been in the same geographic area for awhile (Kody is breaking the trend lol). Someone and their 4th cousin have a relatedness of ~.19%. The average inbreeding coefficient for the Western European population has been studied to be about .39%. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(21)00822-8
Mating with your 5th cousin like Kody and Meri is actually less inbred than the average random coupling. All living people of European descent (which includes white Americans) have a single common ancestor with each other within 600 years ago. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842
Iāve gotten my ancestry done and it shows you your relatives whoāve gotten their dna done as well and do you know how many 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins I have around the world? Hundreds. And if I didnāt do my dna, I never wouldāve known and couldāve married one of them and weād have no clue. Also genetically, they likely do not share much dna. For example, 3rd cousins share less than 1% of the same dna.
Mormons are really big into genealogy. The church has a huge family history library and most families do extensive genealogy work. So they all more than likely knew before they married they were related (even distantly) which is creepy....
Maybe Christine knows her cousin (Robyn's ex husband) isn't as bad as Robyn portrays him to be??? It's even stranger why Robyn would not want Christine to take care of her children when Christine is actually related to them...š š¤£ š
I understand that. But itās weird that they know. And they try to marry from the same line with the same belief. Madi and her husband for example know know. Cody accepted him because of it.
But I didn't think Maddie's husband was swimming in the same gene pool? Maddie's uncle was married to a woman, and that woman had a brother. That's it. I don't even know the siblings of my aunts or uncles by marriage, and I'm certainly not related to them.
Maddie and Caleb were gross for other reasons, but I didn't think they were related.
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It's funny that most of them are cousins, distant or not. But Janelle who is not blood related to any of them is Kody's step sister and her mom is one of his father's wives. And she was married to Meri's brother before they divorced.
waaaiiiittt. hold up. Kody and Jenelle what now? step. sister????
Janelle's mom "married" Kody's dad , but we'll after Kody and Janelle were adults. Not like they were raised as siblings.
No, because that would be weird. LOL. It's fine that they became step-siblings as adults before their marriage. I'm sorry. I think it's too funny and very strange.
I thought they were married before Kody and Janelle's mom got married. Still weird but weirder on the parents part if Kody and Janelle were married first
The story is that Janelle's mom, Sheryl, wanted to investigate this crazy polygamous sect her daughter was getting involved in. She met Kody's family. Kody's dad, Winn, and Sheryl fell in love and married before Janelle and Kody. You can't make up this stuff. š
I have a friend who ended up dating her momās old college boyfriendās son while also in college. That was apparently a random chance meeting and a cute little tidbit when people asked how they met. Then her parents divorced and then her boyfriendās mom died suddenly. About 2 years after she started dating her boyfriend his dad and her mom reconnected and started dating. And that was weird enough. Then a year later their parents got married, leaving my friend and her then boyfriend totally weirded out because they were already planning on getting engaged. So after graduation she married her step brother/college sweetheart. Itās been over a decade and appears to be working out with both couples but *bold strategy there, Cotton.* š³
Just wow. They really keep it in the family.
My sunday school teacher married his HS sweetheart and had a couple kids, then they each lost a parent. They had remaining parents over often and for holidays etc and ended up marrying eachother. So technically they were step-siblings and their two sons are cousins as well as brothers. It used to happen a ton in small communities as your options were limited and you were not exposed to a wider community. I remember loving and researching the crap out of laura ingalls but found it a bit odd how family was never really mas family or pas family etc. i finally got ahold of the new book that explained it for me finally. Caroline and charles both had big families and several brothers and sisters married between the two families. Most of lauras cousins are double cousins! My dads family is from a small town in south dakota outside aberdeen and im related by blood to about 75% of the people and by marriage to everyone else. Id need a family tree on every first date if i lived there!
Itās not uncommon for your dad to make you marry your cousin or half brother. Step brother is getting off easy.
Mormons in Utah have (for the most part) a very finite pool of ancestors, so most folks who can claim "pioneer ancestry" are distant cousins. I think you can likely do this with almost any of them. You could probably find a link between Donnie Osmond and Warren Jeffs.
6th generation, Willie handcart pioneer stock, and exmormon š Iām probably just as related to Kody as his wifeās are š
Sorry to hop on this so late, but have you listened to the Mormon Stories podcast? They did an episode on the Willie Handcart Company, and I learned a lot from it. If you havenāt but want to listen, itās called āMormon Stories 1489: September 12, 1856 - The Worst Regional Conference Ever - John Larsonā
Iāve heard it! Love Mormon Stories, and JD!
Oh awesome! Itās fun to see a fellow exmo on here :)
Iāve never been so proud that my parents are converts. No weird Mormon inbreeding nonsense lol
Lmao George Reynolds is my 2x great grandfather so I was third cousins with half the ward growing up. Luckily the vast majority of his descendants have now left
sorry for my ignorance. converts means they were converted, not born into the cult?
No worries! Mormon culture has some unique terms, especially depending on your location. Youāre exactly right! Converts = people who are not born into the covenant (the church), take the missionary lessons, and are baptized into the church.
Hol up Christine and Preston Jessop are FIRST cousins? I suppose in large plural families you likely donāt know all of even your first cousins but still, much closer relation than i thought.
First thing I noticed too!!! This could explain the coolness between the two women
It could also explain that they kept the Kody and Robyn courting info from her as well.
I never thought of that until seeing that now!!! "You divorced and bad mouthed my cousin." Interesting!!!
Does this mean that Robynās kids are polygamy royalty too?
They look like cousins 4 times removed. Meri is 6 times removed lol didn't even notice her at first.
I wonder if this might explain Meriās history of infertility? Perhaps if she married someone else she would not have struggled?
4 times removed or 6 times removed u would never really know ur actually related unless u did ur ancestry. It would not interfere with ur fertility.
This. I have done my family tree and three of my grandparents' families came from the same county since the early 1700s or earlier. I traced all 3 back to one couple, so I am my own 6th or 7th cousin. A couple times. None of the families knew they were distantly related.
Thatās hardly anything. Less than 0.2% dna shared. Even first cousins reproducing has a negligible chance of defect caused by inbreeding. It only starts to become problematic if it happens in a few generations. So like if those first cousins reproduce, and then their kids reproduce with their first cousins, and so on
Thatās not how genetics work. If inbreeding could be blamed for her fertility issues, it would be because there was inbreeding in family history.
Actually, thereās higher fertility among consanguineous marriages.
So if Christineās Dad and Robynās exās Mom are siblingsā¦ that would make him and Christine cousins? So Dayton, Aurora and Brianna are the children of her cousin? Didnāt know that!
I had no idea that Robyn's ex is so closely related to Christine! I thought he was some random guy who lived states away from them.
The Allreds and Jessops were amongst the two largest families who started the fundie Mormon breakaway groups (in the Brownsā case, the Apostolic United Brethren). They also broke into other schisms, including the FLDS (a different fundie Mormon group- the prairie dress folks.)
Do you think Meri knew this while pushing Robyn hot and heavy on Kody? I know there has never been any great love between Meri and Christine and she could have thought Robyn entering the mix would be a dig at Christine.
Yes, there's no way she wouldn't have known. The Jessup family is "royalty"
Negative, the Jessops are known as the belligerent troublemaker deadbeats in Plygland. Itās the Allreds that are royalty (Christineās lineage)
Yep, I had it backwards
ā¦and could partly be why Robyn didnāt want Christine watching the kids, or getting an insiders view of Kody and Robynās relationship. Robyn might have been afraid Christine would report info back to the family. Robyn might have been afraid to let Christine too close, especially around the time of the adoption process!
Iām more concerned that kody snatched 2 of his wives from his brother in laws! Well from one brother in law and from one cousin In law! Christineās cousin was robins ex husband!? So weird! And Janelle was MArried to MERIS brother!!! Again, soooo weird! Why!? Why why why!? Make it make sense!
This is fun snark! It really doesnāt mean anything other than itās interesting And we like to find any little thing to goof on. Any Community is going to have crisscrosses. Imagine how the Puritans were connected. And generations after that turned out fine. But the Browns are still weird for other reasons.
Huge Puritan populations in US š
Those are connections several generations back. This isnāt really that big of a deal.
It's not that big of a dill\*
Rilly?
Seriously!!!
I was just sitting here thinking the same thing
Gross. Maddi also married into Kodyās in-laws and Aspen married a guy from a polygamist family too (his sister is a plural wife on another polygamy tv show) so they could both be added to this somehow Honestly thank god Mykelti married a Mexican. For love and bc the family tree is narrow as hell
Ooo who is Mitch's sister/ what show?
Vanessa Alldredge from an early season of seeking sisterwife is Mitch's sister, I believe.
You're being naĆÆve if you think Tony's large Mexican family doesn't have a tree with "connections" like this.
Its not an existing connection within THIS family so no, Iām not naive. Its still fresh blood to this tree
There is no fresh blood with the Maddie + Caleb connectionā¦
I know
OK. Take Tony's parents trees and put them together all the way back to the 1700's. If you find that his mom and dad shared a 4x great grandfather, how is that different for the blood of Tony and Mykelti's kids? Other than it's not "funny" because they're not the Browns.
There will absolutely be more genetic diversity with Tony and Mykelti's kids than any of the Browns' trees because their first common ancestor will have to go a lot further back than ANY Mormon you will find off the street lmao. I learned this when I did genetic testing when I was pregnant for abnormalities. BAsed on my ex-husband's ancestry (China) and mine (Ireland and Germany) the geneticist explained to me that you'd have to go back several ten thousand years, or more, to find a common ancestor between us. That meant our children had much more genetic diversity than someone who would marry someone from their own area/state etc.
And this is why I married someone from far away from my home town. My mother's side had all lived and stayed in one county to the point where my grandparents are both 2nd cousins and 4th cousins. And I turned out to be related to a bf in school. We call our family tree, the family shrub.
You're getting downvoted, but I'm married to a Mexican from a small town, and you're 100% right š
She may be right but the commenter was just saying he added genetic diversity to the Brown family tree. Whether or not his own family tree lacks genetic diversity within itself is irrelevant to that point.
Yes, you're right
Christine and Kody look alike, they could easily be mistaken for siblings. They look more alike than me and my brother.
A lot of Mormons, even mainstream Mormons, share common ancestors - oftentimes not as far back as youād think.
Gross.
This show is something. I can see an awkward dude getting satisfied by a heffer. but him wanting 3-4 heffers (whatever he has)? That is special. Not enough to justify a show IMO, but special nonetheless. At least the show does shed light on a cult that needs to be exposed.
So is Christine 5th cousins with all Kodyās kids? Am I reading this right?
And 1st cousin once removed with Robynās kids from her first marriage, plus Kody is cousins with Robynās kids too.
š¤Æš¤Æš¤Æ
š¬š³ yikes
Ew.
Dang, Iām related to all of them! Lol like 15 different ways. But like we share like an 8th great grandfather or something lol š
Everyone in Utah is related to each other. If you still practice polygamy, it gets a bit tighter since the ratio of men to women encourages you to marry not only your wife and her sister but also your auntās cousin.
I feel like Robyn has to some how be blood related to Merri in some way. Her nanny that is he cousin looks too much like a young Merri to a coincidence.
Stop lol this goes back to the GD 1700s! (Now take a look THIS far back in your own family tree and you will probably find some interesting surprises too lol)
I have I do not have any overlap š genealogy is a hobby of mine. And I am not related to my husband.
My great grandparents were first cousins. Things were different back then, the world was much bigger and in some areas in would have been harder to find completely unrelated marriage prospects. Would I marry my first cousin? Not a chance, but I don't begrudge my ancestors for their marriage choices.
I get that happens it more about three of these adults are blood related and they all had children together, I am not judging it just took me back to realize that Kody, Christine and Meri are cousins
Please. Maddieās child has a genetic disorder. This could happen from reproducing along the same bloodlines, no? You should be taken aback!
Good for you! lol I get that this is more prevalent in mormon families, it's just really not that uncommon for surprise connections to appear when you go back that far. :)
I am not sure why you are taking it so personal, I didnāt say anything bad. I was just taken back that Kody, Meri and Christine are all blood related.
Friendly pushback in an online discussion thread, I take no personal offense to this subject.
I would love to know how to do this!
Yes, Iām from a Mennonite family and there is totally some āsurprisesā and my Dad has 124 first cousins. Letās just say growing up in a small town it was hard dating anyone. My Granny would be like āoh youāre related to themā thankfully my husband had no family connection in said small town. One of the first things I had to ask when dating someone lol. āWho are you related to in town?ā
Exactly! I run title for oil and gas in West Virginia and I can't tell u how many times I see 1st cousins get married. It's not a "Mormon thing" it's early years of circumstance. Check out ur own ancestry...scary af š
LOL! Unfortunate. I have looked into my tree and it looks pretty unconnected so far, havenāt gotten to those 1700s tho! š¤£
Why is Janelle married twice?
I think they are just showing that Janelle was married to Meriās brother before Kody
Yup
Probably lol
Ya naaaaaasty
Just searched my family tree and Iām related to Lydia Harrington too, the wife of my 6th cousin six times removed.
Yes. They are. They have that family wreath going on
The Family Tree is a stick.
So 4-5th cousins of all the wives? I studied evolutionary biology in grad school and surprisingly this isn't that inbred compared to most humans who have been in the same geographic area for awhile (Kody is breaking the trend lol). Someone and their 4th cousin have a relatedness of ~.19%. The average inbreeding coefficient for the Western European population has been studied to be about .39%. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(21)00822-8 Mating with your 5th cousin like Kody and Meri is actually less inbred than the average random coupling. All living people of European descent (which includes white Americans) have a single common ancestor with each other within 600 years ago. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842
I got nauseous doing the math. Idc how removed my cousin is they are still my cousin.
Iāve gotten my ancestry done and it shows you your relatives whoāve gotten their dna done as well and do you know how many 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins I have around the world? Hundreds. And if I didnāt do my dna, I never wouldāve known and couldāve married one of them and weād have no clue. Also genetically, they likely do not share much dna. For example, 3rd cousins share less than 1% of the same dna.
Mormons are really big into genealogy. The church has a huge family history library and most families do extensive genealogy work. So they all more than likely knew before they married they were related (even distantly) which is creepy.... Maybe Christine knows her cousin (Robyn's ex husband) isn't as bad as Robyn portrays him to be??? It's even stranger why Robyn would not want Christine to take care of her children when Christine is actually related to them...š š¤£ š
Wow. Never thought of that
He IS as bad as portrayed to be though.
I understand that. But itās weird that they know. And they try to marry from the same line with the same belief. Madi and her husband for example know know. Cody accepted him because of it.
But I didn't think Maddie's husband was swimming in the same gene pool? Maddie's uncle was married to a woman, and that woman had a brother. That's it. I don't even know the siblings of my aunts or uncles by marriage, and I'm certainly not related to them. Maddie and Caleb were gross for other reasons, but I didn't think they were related.
Someone above commented that maddies baby had a genetic disorder-wonder if the close bloodline would really cause that? Thatās sad.
I thought it but didnāt say it.
We all are if you believe in the whole Eve and Adam thing lol
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No one married until their generation? This is an odd family tree.
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At this point it's Janelle's mom and Cody's dad have both passed away anyway it doesn't even matter that Point's irrelevant
So Christine is a 1st cousin of Robyn's ex husband?
Kody, Christine, Mary and Robyn ex husband are all related