By TAO
Some Icelanders Are Accidentally Dating a Relative and Now There’s an App for That
In Iceland, everybody is related. Okay, technically everybody everywhere is related, but in Iceland people are way more related than they are in, say, the United States. The population of Iceland today is about 320,000, and, accord to the genealogy website islendingabok.is, the whole population of native Icelanders derives from a single family tree. As the Icelandic news site News of Iceland says, that’s enough people that not everyone knows each other, but few enough to mean that two Icelanders who are dating might actually be cousins.
(go read the entire article)
In all seriousness, I know there isn’t an app for adoptees and donor conceived to know if they are dating one of their close relatives – but tell me it wasn’t one of your fears…
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shannon2818
April 19, 2013 at 2:46 pm
I heard this story on NPR the other day – the part about adding relatives’ birthdays made me laugh.
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shannon2818
April 19, 2013 at 2:47 pm
I heard this story on NPR the other day – the part about adding relatives’ birthdays made me laugh
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TAO
April 20, 2013 at 11:15 pm
Shannon – I giggled just reading it even, though I realize it is a huge problem and a great solution…
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barb_aloot
April 22, 2013 at 12:31 pm
A doctor once warned me off donor insemination for this very reason (because I live on a small island where is enough risk of this happening anyway)! Genetic testing is getting quite popular with APs who have adopted Ethiopian children to find their kids extended families, particularly cousins who have also been adopted.
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Gershom
April 30, 2013 at 6:03 am
My cousin always hit on me, we didnt’ knwo we were cousins lolll glad i didn’t accept his invitations!
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TAO
April 30, 2013 at 6:37 pm
That would be horrifying – found out that I had a male cousin that grew up in the same community I did – sends shivers down my back thinking about if we had ever met…
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Gershom
May 1, 2013 at 4:10 am
yep, my 2 brothers, sister and cousin were right in the next city. Come to find out my best friends boyfriend was the neighbor to my cousin, we partied ALOT before i knew we were related. i had been in his house a few times, and remember looking at pictures of my family commenting on how pretty they were… didn’t know it was my siblings and father…
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TAO
May 1, 2013 at 3:04 pm
Wow – yet people think it couldn’t happen. I really worry about the outcome for donor conceived. At least for some of us we had a general idea whether or not a relative might be close by due to location – donor conceived have zip and no last resort of any type of record held by the courts – just clinics that close, poor records, no long-term record storage requirement – just terrible in reality.
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