This fascinating essay was written by Linda Walker, who through a growing concern over unusual genetic birth defects turning up in her close family, decided to research her genetic history. What she discovered was a long Mormon history of close family inbreeding involving a practice of polygamy where uncles married nieces, cousins married cousins etc... but they also practiced a form of eugenics, where they intentionally inbreed in an attempt to create a super Mormon race. This is creeeepy. (originaly written in 1991 and updated in 1999)
My cousin Lucky and I were looking for four leaf clovers in the grass. The early blue summer sun warmed our backs, not too hot, just right. This weekend visit with my cousins was a perfect end to the school year. Soon Lucky’s sister, Julie, joined our lazy search for the magic clovers.
Many summer passed and Lucky, Julie and I all grew up to marry and start families of our own. Then, while still a young man, Lucky died of nephritis, the fatal family inheritance. Each family member in their own way carried the burden of Lucky’s failing kidneys. His father donated one of his own healthy kidneys, thus prolonging Lucky’s short adulthood with his wife and small children. Fear began to overwhelm me, for the future, and for my own son. Lucky was the first to die in my generation.
I remembered the studies conducted on my brother and I as children at the University of Utah (U of U) when doctors pronounced us, a special and important family. In the l950’s, research doctors thought we were one of the few families in the world with this form of nephritis, known as Alport’s syndrome.<1> By l980, this theory changed dramatically as many other Utah families accepted the diagnosis. Our ancestral destiny meant we might give birth to sons who would die at maturity or daughters who would carry the trait to the next generation of sons. These defects could be life threatening like nephritis and spinal bifida, or merely debilitating like asthma. Childbirth would be fraught with despair and guilt for me and for many family members. We participated in the study but never received counseling regarding the results of this research. I never knew if I carried this deadly disease or if any preventative measures would halt its insidious march. This lack of information upset me as a child when to my fervent, “Why?” the tightlipped adult answer, “We don’t know”, seemed woefully inadequate. I promised myself to find out the truth when I grew up.
When Lucky died my childish vow surfaced and I began to look into my family history for some answers. My great grandfather, like scores of English immigrants eager to escape a life of poverty, listened when Mormon missionaries offered passage to America in exchange for Mormon baptism. Soon he joined the Mormons in Zion, the new Promised Land, trading a life of mining for religious hope.
A few years later Lucky’s sister, Julie, died of multiple sclerosis, also leaving a family of small children behind. Same family, second child, same period of life, a different fatal disease; was there a connection? My aunt and uncle outlived two of their five children and two more may have nephritis. What was going on in my Utah pioneer family? Surely, there were too many deaths. Could my childish intuition that, ‘the adults and doctors lips were sealed’, against my questions, involve family secrets; secrets relatives took to their graves rather than betray? Or was it true no one knew the answers, because they could not be known, because no one wanted to know?
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