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Continuous Marriage

The average age of a girl to be married was, in the seventeenth century, fifteen. For a boy it was slightly higher, his promptness in the matter being assisted by the aversion of the colonists to bachelors.

It was not in the least uncommon for a man to marry five or six times as the life span of the women was about thirty years. Widows and widowers were not exempt from the public sentiment against unmarried persons.

The promptness of these re-marriages is more startling than their frequency. The number of offspring produced in the colonial family is enormous, but many of the children died at an early age. Clearly our ancestors specialized in production rather than in preservation.

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