Church Membership, Consanguineous Marriage, and Migration in a Scotch-Irish Frontier Population

Abstract

This article discusses the persistence of a pattern of close consanguineous mar riages among a group of Scotch-Irish American families that migrated in almost every generation from the early 1700s to the mid- 1800s. These migrations involved not separate nuclear families, but small networks of families already related by marriage and common descent. Such kin- structured migration created a small set of kin at each new destination who became the focus of spouse selection for the next generation of marriages. The histories of these families suggest that ethnic and denominational separateness from other frontier populations may have contributed both to the pattern of kin-structured migration and, through endogamy, to the associated consan guineous marriages.