Today I am going to spend a little time discussing endogamy -the practice of generations of cousin marriages - within a specific context. Enslaved African-descended people toiled across every pre-industrialized sphere. While I have uncovered small numbers of enslaved kin who laboured in mines, aboard paddle boats, were dock workers, or manufacturing; the vast majority were enslaved within an agricultural context. That is the sphere the majority of my research has focused upon. It's what I know. Hence the somewhat narrow scope of this article.

Before I delve into the topic of this article, I'd like to paint a quick picture of what life was like on the farm or the plantation. I do so with the aim of illustrating the practical reality of how endogamy affected communities of enslaved people. For African Americans who have tested their DNA, this will be an important aspect of your ancestry that needs to be understood. Endogamy is a complicated factor that absolutely influences genetic cousin matches: the number of chromosome segments you will share with dna cousins, and the amount of cMs you will share.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/12/17/endogamy-on-the-plantation/