This isn’t a William Faulkner novel, it’s reality. It’s also not like it sounds. When your family has deep roots in the same area where you were born and raised, it’s bound to happen, and it doesn’t take much digging to find family members marrying family members. They probably don’t even know they were doing it.
This case is different because my cousin on my grandfather’s side, married a cousin from my grandmother’s side. They are not related at all to each other, but it’s not totally coincidental that it happened. All of my New York cousins come from my great-great grandfather who was born in Poland. Their roots are not nearly as deep in American soil, and they know who most of them are, so the chances of marrying one of the Kwiatkowski cousins are pretty remote. My grandmother’s genealogy can be traced well into pre-revolutionary America though. They settled in Pennsylvania, a wild and untamed frontier, approximately two generations before my Chuck’s grandfather and my great-grandfather arrived with their parents from Poland. (more…)
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