Many times when the mother died, the oldest daughter attempted to take her place and hold the family together...In this case, it may have been that the younger daughter had little supervision, and got into some kind of relationship that started out to be innocent, but evolved into something that she was not equipped to handle...and became Pregnant possibly because of lack of knowledge, but then it became incumbent upon the male to "marry" her...sort of a "shotgun" wedding... Frequently on the frontier, a couple would declare their intention to marry and go ahead with setting up housekeeping, then the actual ceremony was performed whenever the next traveling minister arrived...in this case, the girl may have already been pregnant so he went ahead and performed the ceremony, to legitimize the child(illegitimate children were considered a sham) but the marriage was doomed to failure from the start...Also consider that this male might have been slow or "young" for his chronological age... It is Statutory Rape for any male to have sex with a female under 16 years of age in most places, (some places it was 14) even with consent, so the "marriage" was also necessary to keep the male out of jail... We should also remember that there were no artificial Birth Control products like are available today...Abstinence was the only way... Several years ago, I had a neighbor girl who at 14, frequently passed for 18. All of us have seen males that were 18, but looked 14...remember "Billy-The-Kid???" >From: Jeanette Martin <[email protected]> >Reply-To: [email protected] >To: [email protected] >Subject: [GA-Roots] Re: How to calulate ages? >Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 21:56:22 -0500 > >Many in this family wondered about this. Dates have been checked. > >The parents were 23 and 18 when married. >They were 41 and 38 when the mother died Jan 27, 1914. > >The children were dau: 17; son: 11; *dau: 10; son: 8; dau: 5 and dau 2 >when >the mother died of typhoid fever. Son 11 also had typhoid but survived. > >Holden Clan wrote: > > > > >12 when impregnated; 13 years 8 months at birth... > > > > > > > Although possible, I would question these dates... > > > > It's more than possible. I was an OB nurse and believe me..... I > > delivered quite a few 12 year olds. > > Very sad stuff. While it's rare today, I imagine it was just as common > > (really uncommon but the term is being used in another fashion) then, as > > it is now. One thing of note... it's usual that these young mothers are > > victims of incest. Quite possibly if the dates are as noted, then I'd > > question the parentage. > > > > However, it stands to reason to double check on the dates. > > > > Cindy > > >==== GA-ROOTS Mailing List ==== >Faye Dyess [email protected] Listmanager >Thou shalt edit any quoted text down to the minimum thou needest. >DO YOU OWN A COPY OF A CENSUS?? THEN VOLUNTEER TO DO LOOKUPS!!! >http://www.rootsweb.com/~uslookup > _________________________________________________________________ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com