A family perspective
When Cousins Married: Four Marriages Inside the Family
Of the more than two hundred couples recorded on this site, four can be shown to share an ancestor. Three are pairs of Mellott first cousins in Pennsylvania; the fourth is a Marlatt who married a Marlatt in New Jersey in 1772. None of it was unusual for the time.
The four couples
| Couple | How they were related | Ancestors they shared |
|---|---|---|
| Dirck (Richard) Marlatt and Pieternelle (Nelly) Marlatt, married 1772 | First cousins once removed: he was her father’s cousin | Abraham Marlett (1656–1716) |
| Jacob “Red House Jake” Mellott and Abigail Mellott | First cousins | John M. Mellott and Sarah Stillwell |
| John “Squire John” Mellott and Elizabeth “Betsy” Mellott | First cousins | John M. Mellott and Sarah Stillwell |
| Nathan Mellott and Abigail Mellott, both born 1819 | First cousins | John M. Mellott (born 1753) and Elizabeth Sampson |
Two brothers, four children, two weddings
The first two Mellott marriages are really one story. John M. Mellott and his wife Sarah Stillwell were members of the Tonoloway Baptist Church, in what is now Fulton County, Pennsylvania, by 1766. Two of their sons, John (born 1753) and Obedia (born 1755), raised large families side by side.
Then the two households married each other twice. Obedia’s son Jake married John’s daughter Abigail, and Obedia’s daughter Betsy married John’s son, known as Squire John. A brother and sister married a sister and brother, and all four were first cousins.
The children of those two couples were related to each other every way it is possible to be. Ordinary first cousins share two grandparents. These cousins shared all four, exactly as brothers and sisters do, and they had six great-grandparents where most people have eight.
The habit lasted another generation. Nathan Mellott and Abigail Mellott, both born in 1819, were grandchildren of the younger John M. Mellott through two more of his sons, Theodorus and Jacob.
A Marlatt marries a Marlatt
On 23 November 1772 Richard Marlatt of Hunterdon County, New Jersey, took out a licence to marry Nelly Marlatt. Both descended from Abraham Marlett, the son of Gideon who crossed the Atlantic as a boy in 1662. Richard was Abraham’s grandson by his second wife. Nelly was his great-granddaughter by his first. That made Richard a cousin of Nelly’s father, and a generation older than his bride, though only ten years separated them.
The family had forgotten the connection within two generations. In 1852 Nelly’s cousin Lewis Vail, who had met her in Ohio, wrote that her husband “though of the same name, was not of kin to her.” The church registers say otherwise.
Their one child, Abraham, and his nine children in Ohio therefore have Abraham Marlett, Gideon and Gideon’s parents in their tree twice, once on each side, a generation apart. The ancestor lists on their pages show each of those people once, with a note.
Why cousins married
Three things made it likely, and all three applied to these families.
- Small communities. A farming settlement on the Pennsylvania frontier held a few dozen families. After two generations of large families, a good share of the neighbors of marrying age were relations.
- Church and language. People married within their congregation. The Mellotts were Baptists at Tonoloway; the New Jersey Marlatts belonged to the Dutch Reformed churches at Raritan, Readington and Harlingen.
- No law against it. No American state barred first cousins from marrying until the 1850s, and the Marlatt marriage was more distant than that.
Families also moved together. When Richard and Nelly Marlatt left New Jersey for Virginia about 1785, her brothers and his brother’s family were already there or came with them, and the same households appear together again in Ohio after 1809.
See for yourself
To see how any two people on the site are related, including husbands and wives, try the Cousin Connector. If you know of another cousin marriage in the family, please get in touch.