Marcella Hill, 42, found the man of her dreams. After dating for a bit, she became pregnant with his child. As the pair committed to each other, they sat on the couch looking for baby names online when they happened to learn something shocking about their relationship. When they looked at their grandparents on FamilySearch, they realized that they had the same name listed for their grandfather and, ultimately, that the man was the same person, making Marcella and her sexual mate first cousins.
In a confessional video on TikTok, Marcella told her 300,000 followers on Monday that she married her husband, Tage, before learning that he and she shared the same grandfather.
“So I’ve never publicly told anyone, but I accidentally married my cousin,” she confessed in the video for the Chinese-created social media app. Her tell-all video about marrying her cousin has been viewed almost one million times since she uploaded it to TikTok.
“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 started looking at the names of her grandparents and great-grandparents to see if she could get some inspiration for baby names. As she looked at her grandfather, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-grandfather, she realized that the names were the same as her husband’s. Marcella is the CEO of Love Woolies and the author behind Wake Her Up.
“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 said. “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.”
Marcella and her cousin-husband celebrate their twelfth wedding anniversary in March 2023. Despite learning that they were blood relatives, they continued to grow their families. They share a blended family with four children.
After seeing the names on the genealogy website, they called their grandparents and learned that they were cousins.
“We both called our grandparents to ask if they knew each other. They did,” Marcella told DailyMail.com. “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 learning that they were first cousins, Tage immediately Googled “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 said, citing a Live Science story about cousins who reproduce with each other.
The couple was already married before they learned they were blood relatives. Many TikTok users questioned how they didn’t realize their familial connection through their wedding.
The cousin marrying woman admitted, “We got married at a courthouse after work on a Wednesday.”