Family Values in Colonial New York

Abstract

What can a computer-assisted analysis of more than 2,000 seventeenthand eighteenth-century wills tells us about the dynamics of family life in early America? In the hands of a thoughtful quantifier like David E. Narrett, a great deal. Narrett's sophisticated study of inheritance in colonial New York City is a major contribution to an already distinguished body of scholarship in which historians have drawn on patterns of testation to probe the shifting social and economic strategies employed by early American families.1 There is no doubt that wills provide invaluable statistical evidence for documenting the changes in economic priorities and social values that only become evident over an extended period of time. As Philip Greven so eloquently demonstrated more than two decades ago, the shifting inheritance patterns he unearthed in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Andover embodied nothing less than the waning authority of fathers over the lives of their adult sons. But no matter how rigorous the scholarship, with wills there is always the nagging problem of their representativeness. Most provincial New Yorkers, after all, like the residents of New England and the ChesapeaKe, died intestate. On the other hand, even though only one-fourth or one-fifth of the male population in colonial New York City executed wills, an even smaller percentage left estates that were administered in formal intestacy proceedings. In other words, with or without a will, the vast majority of New Yorkers managed to bypass the formal English rules for intestate succession and distribute their property in conformance with their own ethnic traditions. Narrett argues quite convincingly that inasmuch as most of the property left by deceased New Yorkers was dispersed in accordance with deeply rooted customs, wills can shed considerable light on the lives of the intestate majority precisely because they are reflections of those very same customs. Of course, as he readily acknowledges, testators also shaped their wills to meet personal priorities and satisfy idiosyncratic desires. Yet the core of his analysis rests on the assumption that provincial wills were customized versions of