Consanguinity Dispensations

Within the Roman Catholic Church, couples needed a dispensation to marry if they were related to each within a certain degree. The rules were laid down by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. If a couple shared great-great grandparents or closer, then they needed a dispensation. Depending on how close, this might be granted at parish, diocesan (bishop) or papal level. In reality, this meant paying the church an extra fee.

Of course, this required the couple to know about their own connection. Take a moment to consider now, ignoring your genealogical habit, how many of your third cousins you could identify by sight. I’d venture none. Communities in Ireland were smaller in the 18th & 19th century. Before the advent of trains and bicycles, people rarely travelled very far to meet a marriage partner (if they didn’t emigrate). Growing up, I knew a couple of my second cousins because they lived in the same town and my mother had introduced me to them. However, my brother was actually friends with a second cousin in secondary school for a couple of years before a chance remark about the unusual name of said friend’s mother caused the discovery of their relationship!

You might wonder why couples didn’t just lie about a relationship to avoid paying more money. The very fact that communities were smaller in the past meant that it was harder to hide a distant connection, particularly when the banns were being read out three Sundays in a row at Mass. Also, it’s hard for modern people to understand the very real grip of the Catholic Church on people’s day to day lives.

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So what does a consanguinity dispensation look like on a marriage register? It will say something like “2nd and 3rd degree”, probably in Latin. You do see the degree written with the symbols “2° and 3°”. Here’s an example from St. Paul’s Arran Quay parish in 1862 for the first cousin marriage of John Joseph O’Connor & Anne Patterson. Translation: dispensation for second degree consanguinity obtained from the husband’s bishop.

But how do you work out the connection if you find a note like this on a parish record? To help you with this, I’ve put together a little table.

Consanguinous Degree	Common Ancestor	Relationship
2nd degree	Grandparent	1st cousin
3rd degree	Great-grandparent	2nd cousin
4th degree	Great-great grandparent	3rd cousin

Remember that people might not be the same distance to the common ancestor, which is how you get a third and fourth degree relationship. In that case, the couple would be second cousins once removed.

When Thomas Delahunty and Margaret Tobin married in Kilkenny in 1875, they recorded a dispensation in the fourth degree on the marriage register. This might be the only proof that Margaret and Thomas were third cousins, but if they were my ancestors, it would certainly add to knowledge of them. Records probably don’t go far enough back to document the connection.

For more on this and the related (pun intended) field of affinity, I highly recommend this article by Lynn Serafinn, an Italian-American genealogist.

Have you found any examples of consanguinity in your family? Let me know in the comments.