A married couple were astonished to discover they were actually COUSINS.<br /><br />Marcella and Tage Hill, both 42, were browsing their respective family trees on an ancestry website called Family Search to get ideas for a name for their then-unborn first child.<br /><br />At first they thought their great great grandma just had the same name - but soon the penny dropped that they were actually related.<br /><br />Marcella and Tage discovered they had the same great-great-grandma, making them distant - or third - cousins.<br /><br />Her grandpa and his grandma were first cousins.<br /><br />Initially they were worried about the health of their unborn baby, because Marcella was pregnant.<br /><br />But after getting reassurance there was no risk, they decided to name their daughter after their joint great-great-gran, Mary Jane Dollar.<br /><br />Author and entrepreneur Marcella, from Vineyard, Utah, said: "I was on my laptop looking through my family’s names.<br /><br />"He was on his laptop doing the same thing. <br /><br />"And he was suddenly like, ‘that’s so funny, our great great grandparents had the same names’.<br /><br />“At first, I thought that somehow he must be logged into my account. <br /><br />"We both kept going back and forth thinking how could this be? <br /><br />"But sure enough, we soon realised that my grandpa and his grandma were first cousins. It was super weird."<br /><br />Marcella called up her grandfather, Charles Phillips, 86, to ask if he knew Tage’s grandmother Doris Brimhall, who has since passed away.<br /><br />It turned out they knew they were cousins and had lived together as children in Clawson, Utah - which now has a population of 165. <br /><br />He remembered her for having long braids and she said he was "the good kid". However, Marcella was unable to find out more about their joint grandparents - her and Tage's great great grandparents.<br /><br />“At that point, once we’d got past the worry, it just seemed hilarious and strange,” she said.<br /><br />Marcella and Tage, who works in hospitality, were both recently divorced when they met each other, and married 12 years ago, when they had no idea they were related.<br /><br />Their daughter, Jane, is now eight.<br /><br />The proximity of their family trees has led to them being the butt of the joke among friends.<br /><br />“At a neighbourhood party one time, the hosts decided to play a funny game to find out who in the neighbourhood is most closely related," Marcella said.<br /><br />"Everyone used an app that can tell you who in the room has the same ancestral line, and of course my husband and I were by far the most closely related. <br /><br />"They all cheered when we won."<br /><br />It has also caused amusement at family gatherings. <br /><br />“One time at a family reunion, my uncle had made a quiz about our family’s genealogy, and for one of the answers I was like, ‘that’s my husband’s great great grandpa!’,” she said.<br /><br />They realised soon after dating they had both previously lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming.<br /><br />"It’s a tiny place seven hours away from where I now live in Utah,” said Marcella. <br /><br />“But when I met Tage, I found out that during his childhood, he had also lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming.<br /><br />“One time, we were at a reunion with my husband’s family watching old family movies, and I noticed that I had been to the house that I could see in the video. We then took a trip back to Cheyenne together, and the same family who I knew as a 30-year-old woman remembered my husband from when he was a kid.<br /><br />“Our relationship was already super weird, but this just added an extra layer of crazy.”<br /><br />Marcella added: “Our relationship started because we came from two broken places. But us having this common ground of family kind of makes us feel like missing pieces came together to make a whole.”<br /><br />First cousins share a grandparent, second cousins share a great-grandparent and third cousins share a great-great-grandparent.
