Hey, We're Not All Sister Shaggers After All

In the wake of Dick Cheney's lame attempt at humor the other day at West Virginia's expense, Slate's "Explainer" finally dispels the notion that we're just a bunch of inbred hicks:

How'd West Virginia get a reputation for inbreeding?

Exaggeration-prone outsiders. In the 1880s and 1890s, writers such as Mary Noailles Murfree and John Fox Jr. traveled across Appalachia, looking for 'local color,' and overstated the degree to which mountain populations lived in isolation. During the same time period, missionaries reported pervasive ignorance and poverty, with large families living together in ramshackle cabins. The notion of widespread inbreeding was at least in part the result of crude assumptions about how these isolated forest people might have been perpetuating their communities.

It's true that, through the 19th century, transportation networks developed slowly in the rugged, westernmost portion of Virginia (incorporated as West Virginia in 1863). The area was never entirely cut off, but many people lived in remote 'closed communities' with little incoming or outgoing migration. Research on intrafamilial marriage in such enclaves is slim. In 1980, anthropologist Robert Tincher published a study titled 'Night Comes to the Chromosomes: Inbreeding and Population Genetics in Southern Appalachia,' based on 140 years' worth of marriage records. He concluded that 'inbreeding levels in Appalachia … [are neither] unique [n]or particularly common to the region, when compared with those reported for populations elsewhere or at earlier periods in American history.'

There you go. We're the victims of baseless assumptions of outsiders trying to make a buck. Typical.