A Utah mother has revealed the shocking moment she found out she’d “accidentally married her cousin” – after already becoming pregnant with his baby.
Business owner Marcella Hill, 41, shared the revelation about her and her husband days with her nearly 300,000 followers on TikTok last Monday.
“So I’ve never told anyone publicly that I accidentally married my cousin,” she begins the video, which has been viewed almost a million times.
“I was sitting on the couch looking up names for the baby we were going to have and I was in on it [genealogy site] FamilySearch.”
Marcella said she was looking at the names of her grandfather, grandmother, great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother when she realized something was wrong.
Utah business owner and mom Marcella Hill has revealed the shocking moment she found out she “accidentally married her cousin.”
Marcella pictured with her husband Days. The couple has a blended family with four children
“Husband is next to me on his own FamilySearch and he’s like, ‘Oh that’s funny, we have the same grandma and grandpa names,'” she said.
“I look at this line and it’s just like mine. So I’m like, “Oh no no, you’re still logged into my account.”
“Then we look at it and find out that my grandfather is his grandmother’s first cousin.”
The couple then called their respective grandparents to ask if they knew each other. As it turns out, their suspicions were correct – and the couple soon learned that they do in fact share the same great-great-grandparents, making them third cousins.
“Of course, sure. They lived together growing up as kids,” Marcella said.
“We (Marcella and her husband) are third cousins.”
She said she found them while she and her husband were researching baby names during their pregnancy
The couple on their wedding day. They “got married on Wednesdays after work in a courthouse”
The couple (pictured) realized they were cousins when they compared the names of their grandparents and great-grandparents. “My grandpa is his grandma’s first cousin,” she said
Marcella revealed they previously won an award for being “closest relative at a neighborhood activity.”
“And if I go to my family reunion, he gets to go to his at the same time,” she added.
Some people questioned how the couple hadn’t figured it out before that moment.
‘Why didn’t you notice that at the wedding?’ one person asked.
Another added: “Wait how could you not know this before?! Your grandparents weren’t at the wedding?’
Marcella responded to those comments in another TikTok video, saying, “We got married in a courthouse on a Wednesday after work.”
She continued, “Let’s say we had the wedding, and my grandpa and his grandma were there, and we found out we were third cousins at the wedding, what should we do?”
But others didn’t really see the big deal, considering they were third cousins.
The mother while she was pregnant. She also revealed that her grandparents “lived together growing up as kids.”
The couple has been married for more than 10 years. Social media users were confused about how they hadn’t figured it out before
“That’s far enough apart lol. But a crazy coincidence,” said one TikTok user.
“3rd cousins are pretty far away,” wrote someone else.
Another joked, “Say you’re from Utah without saying you’re from Utah.”
A handful of social media users also thought Marcella should have kept this news to herself.
“I think you just shouldn’t have told anyone,” one person said.
And it also seems that Marcella isn’t the only one to accidentally marry a distant relative.
“Ancestry taught my husband and I that we were 8th cousins. degrees are. Barely count as cousins but still came as a shock,” wrote one TikTok user.
“My husband’s parents were 5 cousins. I laughed hearing that from his mom (don’t think she liked my laugh),” said another.