Thank you Ruth. very interesting... Not Derbyshire, but I imagine rural areas cannot have been very different. In Warwickshire, there has been a lot of research on marriages ages and illegitimacy rates because of Shakespeare's famously early marriage (he was 18 and his bride 24, and 3 months pregnant). I came across this, which bears out some of the info in Ruth's text that marriages were not made between young people, as a rule. "Another illuminating statistic has been deduced by local historian Jeanne Jones from records curated by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Between 1570 and 1630 the average age for men to marry in Stratford-upon-Avon was 24. In that 60-year period, and out of 106 cases, there were only three men who married under the age of 20. Of those three, Shakespeare was the youngest and the only one whose wife was already pregnant." Margaret On 05/06/2017 13:19, Ruth Genda via DERBYSGEN wrote: Nicholas asked the question, *Is any anywhere of academic research on illegitimacy in C18-19s ?* A classic text is Lawrence Stone's *The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800* first published in 1977 and still in print (my copy by Penguin in 1990). Also it's available on Kindle. The blurb on the back cover reads, *An analysis of the sexual mores of our ancestors which is often surprising, sometimes diverting, always thought-provokling.* Research based, it gets mixed reviews on Amazon however. But for me it's a great book for dipping into at times like this and is relevant to any county. It contains graphs which people may be interested to see: one is of Illegitimacy Rates and one of Prenuptial Conception Rates between 1600 and 1800. I know that attachments won't appear on Rootsweb. So I've taken the liberty of sending them to everyone named above taken from the lengthy correspondence on the Forum. If you're not one of those and would like copies please let me know. Ruth ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message