Earlier in this discussion, someone brought up whether men had to be able to support a family before marrying in Bohemia and how old people were when they married.  In response, I present the below data from (mostly) Bruck am Hammer (Brod nad Tichou) parish of the age at first marriage.  It shows the average age for men is 26 and women 23 when they first married. This is taken from my relatives in the parish records in the 1700s mostly, but a few are from the late 1600s or early 1800s. These are from small rural villages, roughly 50 houses (mostly Gottschau and Nakentendoerflas). When I was extracting my relatives from the registers, I was surprised by how late people married, and it is interesting to see the actual tables below. I believe I would find similar numbers for Damnau parish that I've gone through.   Some of the outliers, such as relatively old women marrying, come from a man remarrying an older, never-married woman after his first wife died, probably to help raise his kids (Again, in that case, it only counts as the first marriage for the woman, only the man's first marriage age would have gone into the table here). Earlier, Aida wrote: >> Marriages for men at age 17 and women 16 were quite >> common, because in "taking over the family farm" many young men could avoid military service. But I find teen marriages to be pretty rare for either sex. Dennis Age at first marriage: male female 26 23 24 19 24 40 36 28 21 26 24 22 27 37 21 22 24 25 22 29 24 26 19 19 38 18 23 28 20 17 32 24 28 25 26 17 22 20 23 20 25 23 24 20 28 20 22 21 29 20 22 16 26 25 56 24 22 24 42 22 22 39 20 18 30 22 30 28 33 23 21 22 25 22 22 25 27 26 33 26 31 32 24 16 32 22 23 21 31 31 25 15 34 22 21 22 26 21 32 24 20 23 23 27 27 37 31 21 22 19 34 24 33 23 28 19 24 21 28 20 30 20 25 29 32 31 17 22 33 24 27 22 27 22 29 22 21 20 30 23 26 19 22 31 22 20 21 32 23 17 29 18  26.67568 22 26 23.5375 The last numbers are the means. (Not a scientific or random sample, but I'm related to a decent fraction of the population of those villages in that era.) ________________________________