Did polygamy cause cross breeding of common blood lines? Are Utah Mormons inbred?

Serious here.

What makes me wonder is that Utah Mormons all have that Mormon "look." You know the one I mean? That wholesome look. But there is something a little "off" about it. Something not quite right.

Thoughts?

Remember a lot of the posters here are former Utah Mormons.

I don't take offense, in fact I have wondered if the abundance of genetic disease in my extended family is caused by the polygamous heritage, so I think it is a fair question.

SO.....so am I ...they act like inbreds. I was one of them it doesn't offend me.

Polygamy has a big influence in this because wives didn't usually stay with the same man and the next guy might accept her kids from one or two others as his. The genealogy often didn't show this and kids weren't certain of their parentage. Also, some men forced wives to give babies to other barren wives.

My TBM sister and her husband found several genetic connections in their genealogy. They are officially related but not very closely.

I'm guessing most TBMs are related if both families go back to the pioneers and earlier.

Probably not inbred. But there was a tradition (not just with LDS folks) that if a man died, his brother could take care of the family and marry the wife so they would not be destitute.
That made the children brothers and sisters and cousins.

The man I adored for ten years (passed away in January) used to tell me that part of the reason I left Utah was to get out of my gene pool. He was right.

was to prevent inbreeding. I'm not sure if everyone says "s/he got snagged at the pow wow." I was snagged by a Yaqui. Good times. Until I found out he is being *beyond* batshit. Dude. You can be brilliant and gorgeous and kind and then truly dans la lune.

***Wrong damn place!***



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2014 09:49PM by Beth.

You can't paint Utah Mos with that broad of a brush, but you can some of them.

Their was a medical article on the FLDS and a rare genetic disease, which is much more prevalent among their people. I suppose there may be genetic disorders that occur slightly more among Utahns who are natives and have been for generations.

They certainly possess many common personality traits...they are not deep thinkers, heck, they don't LIKE TO EVEN THINK! They are very conservative. They will see faults in others when others have misfortunes. They will blame victims. They are not tolerant of other views, political or religious.

Anyway, yes, Mormons are inbred and it shows up in many ways. I haven't read any medical articles discussing any specific genetic disorder being passed on because of the closeness of breeding lines in Utah.

IIRC, that same study found that this particular form of inbreeding showed itself in large families with predominantly male offspring. Families with nothing but boys.

Not sure how to spell it. I recall that the worst symptom is a tiny head and a resulting inability to think or function normally. Babies die early, almost always by about age 6 or so after never being able to communicate or leave their beds. The only other place where this disease is somewhat prevalent in Pakistan.

Among pioneer Mormons a genetic defect which is more common than in every other population is being born with only one kidney or with at least one kidney which is stunted or not functional.

Other polygamous groups have their own serious genetic defects like club foot or being born with one or more limbs missing.

The tiny head birth defect is called microcephaly. In general, life expectancy for individuals with microcephaly is reduced and the prognosis for normal brain function is poor. Back in the bad old days, people with microcephaly were called pinheads and were sometimes displayed as side show attractions in traveling carnivals. Horrible.

Yes, Utah polygamy is perpetuating this terrible birth defect. I have a sister who worked for a few years in a childrens' nursing home in Utah Valley. Among the severely mentally and physically disabled children for whom they cared, many were born with microcephaly, and all of those microcephaly babies came from polygamous families. Astonishingly, one of those polygamist mothers gave birth consecutively to 5 babies with microcephaly. The parents who brought these poor babies to the nursing home for round-the-clock care never explicitly stated that they were polygamists, but the staff knew the deal. All of those children had short, sad, painful lives and all of their nursing home care was covered by Medicaid.

My sister saw several other polygamous-family-severe-birth-defect patterns, but microcephaly was the most common.

Although, not on purpose, most Mormons in AZ are realated due to the fact that small Mormon settlements (Joseph City, Woodruff, Snowflake, Heber, Clay Springs, Thatcher, St. Johns, etc...) usually only had around 8-10 families settling each community. Since Mormons could only marry mormons and polygamy was still being practiced; many families are related and show certain peculiar hereditary factors (eye color, Tanner hands [ring finger longer than middle finger], bizzare cancers, etc...) but also some good/great hereditary factors passed on (artistic, ability to sing, math comprehension, etc...). Now though, that travel and meeting others is much easier, an Idaho Mormon can meet, date and marry an Arizona Mormon without having to worry too much about possible familial relationships.

Don't forget that monstrous babies were born from these unions and were never given birth certificates, so we have no way of getting any accurate date regarding defects.

Many such babies were considered a judgment of god and were "accidentally" waterboarded to death under a faucet, etc, to save the woman/family the shame. There used to be an unnamed infant graveyard in Hillsdale until a researcher published a picture of it.

I was a contractor briefly at what used to be called the Utah Training School (for disabled) and one of the employees in a cottage there told me --proudly-- that they had some children of General Authorities there that nobody knew about but them.

The cone of silence about hereditary disease in Utah is very active today. After dramatizing the inbreeding in the Kingston line with a slide presentation, I don't see how you could avoid birth defects. One after another, the Kingston patriarchs married their nieces.

Another thing I noted was a large number of deaths via "fasting."


Kathleen Waters

Anagrammy, is the Utah Training School you're referring to the one that was/ (is?) in American Fork? In the 80's I participated in YW/YM service projects (paying visits) to what we called The American Fork Training school. Some of what I saw there is burned into my brain. I still cry at the thought of those dim rooms filled with severely deformed people connected to feeding tubes and reeking of urine. Their were people with Down Syndrome in a separate area of the Training School. But those severely disabled and deformed people appeared to just be being warehoused. There were no mentions of these residents' families.

Anagrammy and HappyandFree, I had a similar experience at the Utah Training school in AF that I will never, ever forget. I've never understood what I saw. It makes more sense now.

I'm just guessing, but I would think the higher up the ranks you go, the more problems. Royalty likes to keep it all in the family.

I think by sending missionaries to so many places, policy actually created a much more diverse gene pool for many of us from Utah. Before that, many of my ancestors never left their European villages, and that is what I worry about.

Polygamy only affected 2-3 generations in Utah, and it was 3-5 generations back.

I tie into the Sessions line in Bountiful through David Sessions son of the famous Patty Sessions. David's brother Perrigine (Don't quote me on the spelling) had 10 wives and 63 kids. We always joked he had a family thicket vs a family tree.

With so few families in the area it was still a problem 150 years later to find a non related wife in Davis county.

I ended up leaving the country to find my wives, but some people still laugh that they are kissing cousins. Though by now they are many times removed.

Anyway a happy pie and beer day to all my long lost relatives in Bountiful.

There is no CSI Utah because
1-No DNA Diversity
2-No Dental Records
: )

There's definitely something screwy about Utah. I'll naively play with some numbers.

Apparently, about 70,000 morons crossed the plains. Of course, these weren't single, totally unrelated individuals. To be kind, I'll call them couples with one kid each. So, 24,000 family units crossed the plains; 24,000 genetic lines popping out the next generation. But wait! Most pioneers were converted with other family members (true for most of my lines), so the pioneers themselves would have to be treated as the first crossing of the ancestors of the pioneers. I'll figure 12,000 genetic lines to play with when they got here. Actually, pioneers from Europe tended to be converted in groups in small towns, where they were probably related to begin with, but let's ignore that.

Factor in polygamy and what do we get? Of the first generation of women born in Deseret, I think ~30% were polygamous. Even if the sex ratio was 1 (and it was higher), we'd have to throw away the genetic lines of 30% of the men (except for the pool cleaner and milkman), so we're down to a gene pool of less than 10,000, in an endogamous, polygamous group in an isolated valley.

And then, polygamy strikes the next generation. The polygamous elite takes a new generation of attractive European women and pumps them full of royal sperm from a small pool. Less attractive women are given to the rank-and-file members as monogamous wives. BY alone starts 50+ "royal" lines which really ought to avoid each other.

Next generation (last official polygamous generation): the attractive daughters of the attractive pioneers are distributed among the royalty again; elite Mormon inbreeding begins.

By 1900, we're down to around 1000 uncrossed genetic lines. This isn't going to end well, is it?

To summarize, if you're in your mid-thirties to early forties, of pure pioneer stock without a drop of royal blood, and you pick up a drunk Daughter of Utah Pioneers, also non-royalty, in a bar, there's only a (1 - 999!/991! / 1000!/992!) = 0.9% chance you're doing your cousin (2nd or closer). Isn't that what everyone really wanted to know?

Edit: How embarrassing. It's 1-992!/984! / 1000!/992!, selecting 8 non-identical random great-grandparents from a pool of 1000 unrelated lines, or a 6.2% chance you're doing your cousin.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2014 04:13PM by ⅽupcakelicker.

I read somewhere that if you marry your cousin, it probably won't have bad effects on your children. But if THEY then marry their cousins and keep this up generationally, it definitely will.

Check out Charles II of Spain. He was the unfortunate victim of multigenerational inbreeding.

If you have family trees, it really comes down to the number of common ancestors, and the % of DNA you both inherit from them. The risk of birth defects when first cousins breed is comparable to the risk of 40+ women breeding, a few % higher than the baseline of 2-3%.

Where it gets messy is in small, isolated communities... If you and someone else have 2/2 ancestors in common, you're normal siblings. 2/4, you're normal first cousins. 31/64... fifth cousins, but genetically practically first cousins, and it's worse if some of those 64 g-g-g-g-grandparents were closely related to each other. Welcome to Utah.

Basically, pretty much everyone has a few recessive genes that, if expressed, would mess someone up pretty badly. We also carry a lot that have small but cumulative negative effects. The closer someone is to you, the more likely they carry the same negative genes. Assuming simple inheritance, a cross between 2 people each carrying a single copy of a recessive gene would have a 25% chance of creating a zygote with 2 copies of that gene. In small towns or small breeding pools, the deleterious genes tend to be the same among many people. This is precisely the opposite of hybrid vigour, where parents have completely different sets of bad recessive genes, so those genes are not expressed in the first crossing.

There's an article in this week's Moab paper where they interview a long-time local and he states that when he was growing up and before Moab got more diverse, he figured he was related to 80% of the town. He looks to be in his 60s. His family was among the original settlers there.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2014 05:18PM by lostinutah.

I would think small town living contributed more to inbreeding than polygamy. It seems most Morridor Mormons tend to marry and stay put (at least it did).

Interesting about the one kidney thing. My husbands TBM sister (born and raised in the morridor) only has one kidney.

Oh I forgot! On dh's side of the family, his brother and his wife compared genealogy and discovered they're related. They had a common ancestor or something. Both his brother and his brothers wife were born and raised in Utah.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2014 06:57PM by twistedsister.

I've read various articles and books on this subject but pertaining to the Amish sect(s). There aren't people lining up to join that religion/culture, and they definitely marry "their own kind". I forget what rare birth defect they are having major problems with, but it was/is pretty sad.

Given the in-migration from the 1860s through 1900, I suspect it's quite the opposite. Surely someone has done a DNA analysis. My own guess is that the northeast coast and south has for more DNA consistancy than the west in general.

For those of you still wondering about reasons for why we have endless suffering vegetables in hospitals like the one in Spanish Fork, chew on a couple quotes from a Mason who was long the mad despot of Utah Territory. God bless those conspiring wives and nurses who finally poisoned him.

Mormon Prophet Brigham Young on October 8, 1854:

"I believe in sisters marrying brothers, and brothers having their sisters for wives. . . ." "In our marriage relations here we are marrying our brothers, and our sisters.

The whole world will think what an awful thing it is." ( LDS Church Archives, Brigham Young Papers, Ms d 1234, ff marked: Addresses-1854, July - Oct., p.20)

"This is something pertaining to our marriage relation. . . What an awful thing it would be if the Mormons should just say we believe in marrying brothers and sisters.

Well we shall be under the necessity of doing it, because we cannot find anybody else to marry." (The Teachings of President Brigham Young, vol. 3, p. 362, 368)

If you're descended from Mormon elite or your ancestors lived in the same small town for generations there may be inbreeding.

The pioneer period lasted for twenty years and involved immigrants from various countries. I haven't found any connections in my genealogy. My ancestors converted as Americans or came from England, Germany and Scandinavia and settled initially in different settlements in Utah.

I would be inclined to think that the fact that Utahans look alike has more to do with environment and diet than inbreeding.

releve Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I would be inclined to think that the fact that
> Utahans look alike has more to do with environment
> and diet than inbreeding.


Uh...what?

Then why don't Virginians all look alike? Or Californians? Or Minnesotans?

Yes. Obviously. Anyone that has spent any time in Utah can tell that.

Fumarase deficiency is the most common autosomal recessive disorder in the Colorado City/Hilldale area. The condition is sometimes referred to as "Polygamist's Down's." Being autosomal recessive, a child typically needs to receive a copy of the mutated fumarated hydratase gene from each parent, although the condition can and rarely does result when a child receives both copies of a gene from one parent and none from the other. The condition had practically disappeared until somewhere around 1930, when, presumably, the gradually declining gene pool brought it to the Short Creek area. Parents of affected children typically are first cousins or closer in relation.

I have no idea if the Kingstons or any of the other fundamentalist LDS polygamous clans have been afflicted with fumarase deficiency, althouth there are other conditions that can result from too small a gene pool.