Marcella Hill, 42, found the man of her dreams and they soon became pregnant with their first child. As they discussed which names to give the baby, Marcella & her partner checked out FamilySearch for information on their grandparents and discovered a shocking detail about their relationship – it turned out that she had been dating her FIRST COUSIN all along!
Marcella bravely opened up to her 300K TikTok followers in an emotional video confession that she had already wed the love of her life, Tage, before discovering they shared the same grandfather.
“So I’ve never publicly told anyone, but I accidentally married my cousin,” In a revealing video uploaded to TikTok, she confessed her marriage to her cousin – and since it’s been posted, almost one million people have viewed the story.
“I was sitting on the couch looking for names for the baby that we were about to have and I was on [genealogy site] FamilySearch.”
Marcella, the CEO of Love Woolies and author of Wake Her Up, decided to look back into her genealogy for some baby name inspiration. She was surprised when she noticed that the same names as her husband were used on both sides of their families-by grandparents, great-grandparents, and beyond!
“Husband’s next to me on his own FamilySearch, and he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s funny, we have the same grandma and grandpa’s names,’” she stated. “I look at this line, and it’s all the same as mine. So I think, ‘Oh no, no, you’re still logged into my account.’ Then we start looking at it and we realize my grandpa is his grandma’s first cousin.”
In March 2023, Marcella and her cousin-husband will be celebrating twelve years of marriage. Even after discovering their familial ties, they chose to continue on in building a family together – now with four kids between them! It’s clear that the strength of their love is larger than any obstacle life throws at them.
After uncovering their names on the genealogy website, they phoned their grandparents to find out that they were indeed cousins.
“We both called our grandparents to ask if they knew each other. They did,” Marcella said. “My grandpa said, ‘Ya, the girl with the long braids.’ And Tage’s grandma said, ‘Yes, he was the good kid.’ They had spent some of their childhood living together.”
After discovering that they shared a familial bond, Tage hastily searched the web for more information “the risks of having a child with your third cousin… feeling suddenly as if we had done something totally unacceptable [without] knowing. Google reassured us with this: ‘The researchers suggest marrying third and fourth cousins is so optimal for reproduction because they sort of have the “best of both worlds,”’” she corroborated her statement with a Live Science article that discussed the phenomenon of cousins who opt to reproduce with each other.
When the couple found out that they were blood relatives after already tying the knot, TikTok users had one burning question – how could these two not have realized their familial connection through all of the planning for their wedding?
The woman admitted, “We got married at a courthouse after work on a Wednesday.”
