Determinants of Age at Marriage in Colonial Perquimans County, North Carolina

Abstract

C~ OLONIAL America has recently become the focus of many community studies that have given us a greatly improved sense of early demographic patterns. Evidence from New England suggests, for example, that ages of males at first marriage were quite similar to those in England, while New England women apparently married at ages several years younger than those of their English counterparts. Studies of the Chesapeake offer a significantly different picture, with average marriage ages for the native-born of both sexes often falling well below the New England level.' Beyond these broad outlines it is still unclear how marriage ages differed between and within regions. The information so far assembled suggests that a variety of forces combined to determine marriage ages in colonial America. The most general and common explanation, for both a particular marriage age and any marked fluctuations, is the sex ratio. For the seventeenth-century Chesapeake a factor of special importance was the flood of young servants who were usually forced to delay marriage until their indentures were up or until they were able to purchase their freedom. Several historians of New England, most notably Philip Greven, have argued that paternal pressures, often connected with land shortages, forced young men and women to delay marriage.2 In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, such pressures had a less pronounced impact. Many young men and women