[LMB] Age at first marriage

[Paula Lieberman]

European nobility etc. tended to marry early.  The rest of the societies 
married later, if at all.  But fiction tended to focus on nobles and 
royalty, not commoners.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ann Sharp" <axsc at sbcglobal.net>


> From: Jason

> I'm really not so sure that frontier women married
> as early as seems to be believed. I checked my
> genealogy database for my 1790s western
> Pennsylvania ancestors (as the closest match for
> the WGW) and found no marriage dates have
> survived unless I want to presume that they were
> married a year before their first child.

Ann:

Genealogist's rule of thumb for Western Europe and
America:  If the young couple were going to
housekeeping on their own, the usual/average age at
first marriage was about twenty-four for the young
man, twenty for the girl.  These numbers are
reasonably well supported once we start seeing enough
record-keeping for Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary Person to
have both a baptismal date and a marriage date
recorded, late 16th-early 17th centuries.