Re posted from the Qld mailing list as a story of interest Does any one know of or can find an earlier Golden wedding celebration here ?? Bye MargM List Admin To: <aus-qld@rootsweb.com> Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 7:42 AM Subject: Re: [AUS-QLD] Leonard and Catherine GERHARDT What a delightful story! I am interested in the claim that it's the first golden wedding anniversary in the Australian colonies. I realise that life expectancies back then weren't what they are today. However, I also know from my own family history, many people did survive into old age nonetheless. Even if only 1 person in 100 make it to their mid-70s (a typical age for a golden wedding anniversary), then the chances of a couple surviving that long together would be 1 in 10,000 and the population of Australia was far bigger than that. So I would have thought, statistically, there should have been a lot more golden wedding anniversaries happening. So I did a bit of looking around and it seems this Toowoomba couple was not the first, as the earliest newspaper reference I can find to a golden wedding here in Australia is this one from 1864: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article39131610 "A Golden Wedding.- Lately, at Tanunda, a man and woman named Frichse celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their wedding-day. They are aged respectively 75 and 72 years, and their little jubilee was enlivened by the presence and gifts of many of their neighbours. The party attended divine service, and the Bev. Dr. Muecke preached an appropriate sermon, after which the day was spent in harmless festivity." So it seems the standard reward for 50 years of married life was a church service followed by "harmless festivity". Given that our Toowoomba couple's celebrations were conducted with a "just appreciation of the Sabbath", one can only assume that golden wedding anniversary celebrations had the potential to be wild affairs if not carefully managed. Interestingly, both stories appears to involve a German couple, and a number of WWW sites do say that silver and golden wedding anniversaries are in fact a German custom. http://marriage.about.com/od/anniversariescelebrations/a/annivhistory.htm This makes me wonder if golden wedding anniversaries might have been happening in the wider community but not celebrated (and hence not reported). In this regard take a look at this 1867 article which mentions the silver wedding of the King and Queen of Denmark (hmm, Lutherans again!) and provides an explanation of the terms "silver wedding" and "golden wedding": http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13151675 The Princess and Prince will in May visit Paris, and proceed to Denmark to be present at the 25th anniversary of the marriage of their Majesties the King and Queen -- their "Silver Wedding," as it is called. The 50th anniversary of the married life is called the "Golden Wedding". so perhaps the practice of celebrating silver/golden wedding anniversary was not commonplace at the time that it needed to be explained.