For many years I have been a fan of Edgar Cayce. Cayce was poor and tormented about the validity of his spiritual gifts and the ethical implications of earning a living from his gifts. (Here's a link where you can learn about who Edgar Cayce was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Cayce)
Cayce's strong belief that his gifts should be used to help others has been the North Star for me, as I have encountered many far less ethical spiritual leaders throughout my own spiritual journeys.
A short time ago I had the idea to look up Mr. Cayce's genealogy. He grew up in Hopkinsville, Kentucky not far from where I was from, so I had my suspicions. Yep....I'm related to him through my maternal great grandmother's father's paternal grandmother (a weaving path! Have I lost you yet?). Ha, ha! Ok...my maternal grandmother was a Caldwell, her mother a Blackard, her father's mother was Catherine Garrett (see previous article on her and Spivey Blackard) http://historicalgenealogy.blogspot.com/2008/06/good-stuff-bad-stuff.html
Edgar Cayce's paternal great grandmothers were sisters, making his grandmothers first cousins! Whoa! Oddly, I have a similar scenario in my genealogy. My paternal great great grandparents were first cousins, one generation further back than Cayce and not the family line that we share.
More on the practice of first cousin marriages:
http://www.mysticmedicine.com/current-health-issues/the-science-of-marrying-your-cousin
Another oddity, my link to Cayce is through this intermarriage making me his distant cousin twice over.
Read the article above and see that this is more common than most of us ever knew and still in practice in many countries. There seems to be much less evidence of genetic deformities than we have been led to believe. I always thought it was the product of time and long past traditions. Also, everyone assumes it's just "a hillbilly thing". For me it was through my Canadian Irish ancestry, not my hillbilly line😳.
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