I got my UT account to work! Thus I now have access to all the wonderful journals and databases. I came across an interesting article searching Central Issues in Anthropology today, by a Robert B. Tincher and thought I would share.
Night Comes to the Chromosomes: Inbreeding and Population Genetics in Southern Appalachia
Good ol’ uncle brother first cousin Pappy
It’s not breaking science by any means, it’s from 1980, but I thought it was a good article none-the-less. The author looks at records covering 140 years from Old Morgan County, Kentucky and takes isonymy (marriages of individuals with the same surname) records as an analogue for inbreeding. He uses this data to generate an “inbreeding coefficient.”
First cousin marriage yields a coefficient of 1/16, first once removed 1/32, second cousins 1/64, and so forth.
Chart 2 summarizes how this works and what the probability of isonymy is in different consanguineous marriage arrangements:
Not quite used with permission. Please don’t sue me, American Anthropological Association.
The paper also tried to distinguish between ‘random’ inbreeding which naturally occurs in any population of given size and inbreeding that was more prevalent than would be predicted by population size.
Rates of consanguineous marriage in Old Morgan County, distinguishing between predicted random and estimated inbreeding.
The general conclusion is that inbreeding in the Appalachians varies from place to place and time to time, and tends to follow larger national trends. For example, there was an upsurge after the Civil War, but this coincided with a general trend in the South at that time due to the culling of breeding age men in that conflict (some estimates put the number of deaths and serious casualties among military aged men in the South at 50%, and the Appalachians were hit particularly hard). Apparently, inbreeding is also unevenly distributed among kin groups, with some engaging in much more of it than others. This ups the percentages but is not necessarily reflecting the general practice of most Appalachians. Thus, generalizations are extremely treacherous.
He also points out that in his Old Morgan County sample was not terribly out of line with rates recorded in many other locations. The methods used in other studies (pedigree analysis mainly, which tend to underestimate inbreeding), but he creates some rough comparative tables:
The percentage measures the percent of consanguineous marriages, the F the inbreeding coefficient, the Fr random inbreeding and the Fn non-random inbreeding.
Tincher sums it up thus:
Compared with those that have been reported for populations elsewhere,
or at earlier periods in American history, Appalachian inbreeding values
do not seem extreme enough to justify labeling intermarriage as something
unique or particularly common to the region. Evidence from at least four
Appalachian localities—-”Beech Creek,” “Little Smoky Ridge,” “Bullhead
Creek,” and Old Morgan County—suggests that consanguineous marriage has
been common only among certain kin-groups, and hardly as widespread as popular depletions of the region have maintained. [...]In parting, it is interesting to consider how the mainstream has used
Inbreeding in their image of Appalachia. Ideas about intermarriage first
appeared around the same time that unionization of the coal industry and
large-scale outmigration from the region were beginning to occur. The public,
through newspaper stories and face-to-face confrontation, was making the
upsetting discovery of an Appalachia that did not jibe with their earlier
romantic preconceptions. Had it figured in earlier portrayals, inbreeding
in Appalachia would no doubt have been ascribed the beneficial effect of
maintaining its inhabitants’ pure Anglo-Saxon ethnicity- Instead, it has
been used to ridicule and downgrade mountain people, and to emphasize and
account for the differences perceived between them and other Americans.
As my econ teacher is fond of quiping, “Bless their poor, Yankee hearts.”
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