Kissing Cousins? Oh my!

The past two days I have spent working on our family tree. It's a fun, obsessive activity for me, and it can take up hours at a time, allowing me to avoid the other things I should be doing. I've been in something of a crash mode since getting back from the old house for the last time on Tuesday afternoon. I know I have to go again tomorrow or Saturday, so I am sort of checking my brain into other things for a while, with the full knowledge that I need to start up with some other important things on Monday.

Well, once in a while I discover something kind of cool in my family chart digging. Today, what I discovered was a bit shocking. I found an interesting wrinkle in Dan's family: a man married a woman whose grandfather was his own father! I think that would be a bit more troubling these days, but I guess marrying close relatives was all the rage in bygone eras.

But there's more! You see, Daniel and I are cousins. Before you call the civil and church authorities, we're something like 20th cousins 4 times removed, so I think we're legal in all 50 states. That's my very inexact calculation, and someone who understands the whole cousin calculation situation better than I can correct me if they like, but it's clear that we're sufficiently distant.

In any event, Daniel and I are tied by blood in jolly Olde England -- Elmley Castle in Worcestershire, to be precise -- in the early 13th century, in the person of one William de Beauchamp, Lord of Elmley.

Now, I have known for many years that I spring from a long line of Beauchamps, as I had the dubious distinction of being of the Beauchamp bloodline through an all-male line of descent for 19 generations, broken only when my Beauchamp great-grandmother married and surrendered her Beauchamp name. What I didn't know is that while I descended from the Beauchamps of England, I narrowly missed descending from what I will refer to as the "cool" branch of the family that Daniel, lucky son-of-a-Beauchamp (sorry), managed to descend from, even though his line didn't keep the surname alive for such a long time.

Why is that the "cool" branch? Well, while my part of the family was busy keeping the name alive through various and sundry 5th-born sons and the like, Dan's line was busy surveying their newly-inherited Warwick Castle, which his part of the family would hold for 5 or 6 generations, until a Beauchamp woman in his direct line married her way out of the name and the Castle inheritance. (The Beauchamps only held the castle for one or two generations after that anyway).

So, why is this so cool? Warwick Castle just happens to be the only castle in England that we have visited together! It's a bit of an amusement park now, with the pricetag to match, but it is also beautifully preserved. When we were in the town of Warwick and visited the church there, we spoke to a docent of my Beauchamp forebears... but little did we know that Dan had some of his own, and that they owned the castle! I'll dig up photos from our time there eventually, but in the meantime, I offer this one in public domain:


See, William and Isabel (our mutual great-great-etc. grandparents) had at least two sons. Their son William (Dan's great-great-etc.-1 grandfather) managed to inherit the castle from his maternal uncle. Their other son, Walter, (my great-great-etc.-1 grandfather) didn't... but he did manage to keep the bloodline going in my direction! *sigh*

Ah well... as they say, time heals all wounds. I have now married back into distant descendants of the cool Beauchamp line. What I couldn't do by birth, I could do by marriage... and by accident!

Ah well, castle or no castle, this is one cousin I intend to go right on kissing!