Did your female ancestor really get married in her teens? скачать в хорошем качестве

Did your female ancestor really get married in her teens?

Did you ancestor really get married at age 16? Probably not. Here’s the quick version: 1) Mean and median ages at first marriage are pretty consistent for the past few centuries: women in their early twenties, men in their mid to late twenties. 2) Laws banning marriage below a certain age without parental consent also go back centuries. 3) If you really think it happened, there’s probably an interesting story. Look deeper. When I started researching genealogy, I had the impression that, a hundred or more years ago, everybody got married in their teens. And I definitely encountered some female ancestors where this appeared to have happened—especially in the mid-1800s, when U.S. census records started naming every person. But in nearly every single case, something else was happening. Perhaps the marrying teen was actually a second wife who just happened to have the same name as the first wife’s. Or the child whose age suggested a teenage marriage was actually a nephew or niece. Or the young wife’s birth year was mis-transcribed. It could be any number of reasonable explanations. My rule of thumb now is, from the 1600s to the 1960s, when genealogical records are reasonably extant, that women married at age 20 at their earliest, while the earliest age for men was mid-twenties. Anything earlier than that, I’m going to take a very close look.