Consanguinity ("con- (with) sanguine (blood) -ity") refers to the property of being from the same lineage as another person. In that respect, consanguinity is the quality of being descended from the same ancestor as another person. Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin through either biological cultural or historical descent An ancestor is a Parent or ( recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i Consanguinity is an important legal concept in that the laws of many jurisdictions consider consanguinity as a factor in deciding whether two individuals may be married or whether a given person receives property when a deceased person has not left a will. Law is a system of rules enforced through a set of Institutions used as an instrument to underpin civil obedience politics economics and society

The degree of relative consanguinity can be illustrated with a consanguinity table, in which each level of lineal consanguinity (i. cousin in Kinship terminology is a relative with whom one shares a common Ancestor, but in modern usage the term is rarely used when referring to a e. , generation) appears as a row, and individuals with a collaterally-consanguineous relationship share the same row. Generation (from the Greek γενεά) also known as procreation, is the act of producing Offspring. See, e. g. , table of consanguinity.

Legal definitions

In regard to family law, generally, consanguinity becomes important in defining who may marry. Some states forbid cousins to marry. Others are more lenient and only forbid people to marry their brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, or aunts and uncles. On a related note, many states prevent individuals from serving on a jury in which they have a certain degree of consanguinity with the defendant.

A table of consanguinuity displays the relationships between familial relatives.

Several volumes of Smith's Laws, enacted from 1700 through 1829, contain certain public and private laws of the Province and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Several laws with a prescribed punishment against adultery, bigamy, incest and fornication and all combinations of those crimes were enacted in 1705. They are found in volume I of Smith's Laws along with a table of Degrees of consaguinity and affinity [1].

In regard to the law of intestate succession (when a person dies without a will), under the Uniform Probate Code of the United States section 2-103, after a surviving spouse receives his or her share, the descendants (depending on the circumstances this may include children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren, either biological or adopted) receive the remainder of the intestate estate. Intestacy is the condition of the estate of a person who dies owning property greater than the sum of his or her enforceable debts and funeral expenses without having made a The Uniform Probate Code ( commonly abbreviated UPC) is a uniform act drafted by National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL The United States of America —commonly referred to as the If there are no children, the decedent's parent(s) receive the remainder of the estate. If there are neither descendants nor parents, the decedent's estate is distributed to descendants of the decedent's parents (again, depending on the circumstances, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, grand nieces and nephews and great grand nieces and nephews). If there are no descendants, parents, or descendants of parents, then the deceased's property passes to descendants of the grandparents of the decedent's (uncles and aunts, first cousins, or first cousins once, twice, or thrice removed).

The connotations of degree of consanguinity varies by context (e. g. , Canon law, Roman law, etc. Canon Law, the Ecclesiastical law of the Catholic Church, is a fully developed legal system with all the necessary elements courts lawyers judges a fully articulated ). Most cultures define a degree of consanguinity within which sexual interrelationships are regarded as incestuous (the "prohibited degree of kinship"). Incest refers to any sexual activity between closely related persons (often within the immediate family that is illegal or socially Taboo. The prohibited degree of kinship refers to a degree of Consanguinity (relatedness below which sexual interrelationships are regarded as Incestuous Inbreeding In the Roman Catholic Church, unwittingly marrying a closely-consanguineous blood relative is grounds for an annulment, but dispensations were granted, actually almost routinely (the Catholic Church's ban on marriage within the fourth degree of relationship (first cousins once removed) lasted from 1550 to 1917; before that, the prohibition applied to marriages within the seventh degree of kinship). Annulment in the Catholic Church See also Annulment (Catholic Church In the Roman Catholic Church, a marriage is considered to be a valid contract In the Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church, a dispensation is the suspension by competent authority of general rules of law in particular cases

Adoption may or may not be considered at law to create such a bond; in most Western societies, adoptive relationships are considered blood relationships for these purposes, but in others, including both Japan and ancient Rome, it was common for a couple with only daughters to adopt a son-in-law, making the marriage one between adoptive siblings. Adoption is the act of legally placing a child with a Parent or parents other than those to whom they were born

Among the Christian Habesha highlanders of Ethiopia and Eritrea (the predominantly orthodox Christian Amhara and Tigray-Tigrinya), it is a tradition to be able to recount one's paternal ancestors at least 7 generations away starting from early childhood, because "those with a common patrilineal ancestor less than seven generations away are considered 'brother and sister' and may not marry. NOTE This intro is the result of careful NPOV work Please do not make potentially controversial edits to it without first discussing on the talk page Eritrea () ( Ge'ez: ኤርትራ ʾErtrā, Arabic: إرتريا Iritriya) officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in Amhara ( Amharic: አማራ Ge'ez: አምሐራ is an Ethnic group in the central highlands of Ethiopia. The article has so much wrong statements Readers should not take it serious " The rule is less strict on the mother's side, where the limit is about four generations back, but still determined patrilinearly. This rule does not apply to Muslims or other ethnic groups. ^[1]

Rates of occurrence

Historically, some European nobles cited a close degree of consanguinity when they required convenient grounds for divorce, especially in contexts where religious doctrine forbade the voluntary dissolution of an unhappy or childless marriage. Divorce or dissolution of marriage is the termination of a Marriage. A religion is a set of Tenets and practices often centered upon specific Supernatural and moral claims about Reality, the Cosmos Conversely, the consanguinity law of succession requires the next monarch to be of the same blood of the previous one; allowing, for example, illegitimate children to inherit. In Common law, legitimacy is the status of a Child that is born to parents who are legally married to one another or that is born shortly after the It is estimated that 55% of marriages between Punjabi Pakistani immigrants in the United Kingdom are between first cousins,^[2][3][4] where "preferential patrilateral parallel cousin marriage" (where a boy marries his father's brother's daughter) is often favored.

Genetic Disorders

The offspring of consanguinous relationships are at greater risk of certain genetic disorders. Autosomal recessive disorders occur in individuals who are homozygous for a particular recessive gene mutation. Zygosity refers to the genetic condition of a Zygote. In genetics zygosity describes the similarity or dissimilarity of DNA between Homologous In biology mutations are changes to the Nucleotide sequence of the Genetic material of an organism This means that they carry two copies (alleles) of the same gene. An allele (ˈæliːl (UK /əˈliːl/ (US (from the Greek αλληλος allelos, meaning each other) is one member of a pair or series of different forms Except in certain rare circumstances (new mutations or uniparental disomy) both parents of an individual with such a disorder will be carriers of the gene. Uniparental disomy ( UPD) occurs when a person receives two copies of a Chromosome, or part of a chromosome from one parent and no copies from the other parent Such carriers are not affected and will not display any signs that they are carriers, and so may be unaware that they carry the mutated gene. As relatives share a proportion of their genes, it is much more likely that related parents will be carriers of an autosomal recessive gene, and therefore their children are at a higher risk of an autosomal recessive disorder. The extent to which the risk increases depends on the degree of genetic relationship between the parents; so for incestuous relationships where the parents share 1/2 of their DNA the risk is great, but for relationships between second cousins where the parents only share 1/32 of their DNA the risk is less (although still greater than the general population). ^[5]

See also

• Endogamy
• Heredity
• Cousin
• Cousin couple
• Genealogy
• Genetics
• Inbreeding
• Prohibited degree of kinship
• Mendelian inheritance
• Pedigree collapse
• Double first cousin
• Purebreed
• Uniform Probate Code

References

• Kingston H M, "ABC of Clinical Genetics", Pages 7 & 26-27, 3rd Edition (2002), BMJ Books, London, 0-7279-1627-0

External links

• Kalmes, Robert and Jean-Loup Huret. "Consanguinity." - Includes detailed information on the application of the coefficient of consanguinity
• Burtsell, Richard L. "Consanguinity (in Canon Law)." The Catholic Encyclopedia. The Catholic Encyclopedia, also referred to today as the Old Catholic Encyclopedia, is an English-language Encyclopedia published by The Encyclopedia
• Consanguinity from GeneWeb

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