LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP

By Betty Freauf
October 24, 2010
NewsWithViews.com

Someone has said that the reason a Christian ought not to marry a non-Christian is that if you marry in the family of the Devil, you are going to have trouble with your father-in-law. In generations past young folks married within their own ethnicity and religious faiths. Because of our sinful nature, there may have been cases of incest and spousal abuse and occasionally there may have been a divorce but as a general rule, once married they stayed married giving the children a sense of stability and financial security.

I had a cousin who worked ten years putting the family history together on my German dad’s side of the family. She did an excellent job tracing their roots from Germany to Russia in the early 1800s and eventually to the U.S. I shared the book with a German lady who married a military man and ended up in the U.S. She opened the book to the places of birth and immediately said she was born in the same area as my grandparents. We laughed and said maybe we were related. An Englishman standing nearby commented, “Ya, you probably are. There was a lot of inbreeding going on in those little communities.â€