Did your female ancestor really get married in her teens?
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- čas přidán 10. 09. 2024
- 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.
Excellent topic. Another channel said they were horrified at a female marrying at 13. I suspect she was a second wife. It's rare that a female marries so young back then.
I've found a woman in my tree married young that is a real sad story. Maud, a fourth cousin once removed appears to have had a very hard and short life. She was born in 1918 (according to the date on her tombstone). She was married in 1931 to a man aged 23. Her marriage certificate says aged 15 but that was obviously not correct. She was just short of her 13th birthday! Three months after marriage Maud gave birth to two premature twin girls who died at birth. She had four more girls born between 1932 and 1936. One died three weeks after birth, two others died at ages 12 and 16. Only the last daughter survived and still lived in the area in 1999 at last report that I found. Maud and her husband were later divorced in 1952 and he remarried a month later. Tragically Maud died in 1958 at age 39.
Nope my grandmother got married at 15! I have all of the love letters between her and my grandfather!
Nice! That must be a fun story.
My 5th gr-grandfather was 25 when he was married in 1757. Most researchers I've found identify his wife as being born in 1744. A 25 year old marrying a 13 year old? That *felt* wrong. The lure of this woman was her mother who definitely descended from Mayflower passenger George Soule. But, studying her, I found that girl married another man several years later - at 23 - and moved to Vermont. Digging deeper I found several girls with the same given and surname throughout the 1700s. I found the right / more-likely one born in 1734... 23 in 1757. I can't find her anywhere else after the marriage. It's not definitive but it's much more likely than a 25 year old man marrying a 13 year old girl... in a Baptist church. That situation taught me to do the math for every marriage and proposed child's birth.
My grandparents got married in 1914. My grandfather was 23 and my grandmother was 14. What's more, they eloped and crossed state lines to get married. It was illegal for anybody under 18 to get married there, but my grandmother lied about her age. Things like that DID happen back in the day.
My grandmother got married at the age of 14 in the year 1914. She and my grandfather eloped and crossed the state line into Maryland to get married. And yes, Maryland law at the time said that a person had to be 18 to get married. My grandmother lied about her age when they went to get the marriage license. My grandfather was 23 when they got married. Can you imagine what they would've done to him had he tried that today? It literally would have been a federal case because he transported an underage girl across state lines.
There's one factual mistake in this video. The founding of the Jehovah's Witnesses had nothing to do with New York's burned-over district. The JW's were founded much later--in the 1870's--in Pittsburgh.
My great grandmother got married at 12, and my grandmother at 13. Both with parental permission. That was in the state of Georgia.
My grandmother got married at age 14--and not with parental permission! My grandparents eloped to Maryland. She lied about her age on the marriage license.