Consanguineous Marriage

A consanguineous marriage is a marriage between two people who are closely related to each other. These types of marriages have been fairly common in European royal families and in isolated communities (isolated by distance or for religious reasons). In the modern world it is normally illegal to marry within "3 degrees" of kinship which means it is illegal to marry (or have sexual contact) with anyone closer than a third cousin. This is due to the fact that close relatives carry much of the same DNA and this type of close relationship can cause the pairing of recessive "bad" genes or rare genes (genes that carry negative and even fatal diseases and disabilities).