p ICTURES of grandparents or great-grandparents hang today beside needlework samplers and faded hair flowers in heavy frames on walls of an occasional farmhouse parlor. Heirlooms now, they typify a cultural period that had also its characteristic patterns of social arrangement. The early designs for living are heirlooms, too, but not yet as completely relegated to walls of memory as are paintings and handwork in those parlor frames. Sometimes, indeed, we have nostalgic urges to recall them entirely from past to play again old roles of certain status in present period of greater social confusion. But cultural systems change and if there were to be any permanence of role and status it would be too often a kind of social rigor moruis. Specific patterns of family life are therefore neither universal nor permanent. Our pictures of farm family, as of every other social grouping, must be adjusted at intervals to cultural change in each locale and in each social stratum. A classic picture of early farm family in New York State has been worded by James Mickel Williams.' The figure in his portrait is an English puritan family reaching New York via New England, gradually reshaped by conditions of pioneering, but with basic patterns enduring throughout period of subsistence farming and continuing even into recent periods of commercial agriculture and contemporary metropolitan dominance. The pioneer American family was large, biologically vital, and of strong social texture. It was the beginning and end of rural social organization.2 Family groups were geographically isolated, economically self-sufficient and socially self-contained. Parents were often the school, church, in extreme cases state.3 Fathers were austerely dominant.