The past was a different country!

[Mauvish1]

Has anyone come across very young marriages in their FH research?

I’ve got a few (not all my family as I do other trees as well!)

1709 – Philip Foster Smith (an attorney, age unknown) married Ann Pegge. Ann was just 14. I suspect Anne’s father, who was reasonably wealthy and part of the local gentry, was keen to get her off his hands as she was the only child from his first marriage and he’d subsequently remarried and started a new family, who he clearly favoured in his will. Philip and Ann had their first child a year later.

1774 – Philip Gell of Hopton Hall, at the age of 50, married Dorothy Milnes who was just 16. Dorothy’s brother in law commented after visiting them that she was a pretty little thing but way too young for her husband (you don’t say!!)

1775 – 15 year old Mary Holyland eloped with Dr James Carmichael Smith, who was 28; they married in Gretna Green. Any scandal didn’t do the doctor any harm – he became Physician Extraordinary to King George 3.

1807 –Jane Hale married Henry Whitfeild, a captain in the army. He was 35, Jane was 15.

All these couples moved in respectable and/or wealthy circles. Clearly society did not cast them out - far from it, the girls were probably congratulated on auspicious marriages. But we would be horrified by this happening nowadays - the men would be on the sex offenders register!

Has anyone else similar stories to tell?

My great grandmother married at 16 a man 10 years older in 1891. Someone maybe thought there was an issue at the time because she appears in the census still in the family home, but married, heavily pregnant, with her age given as 20. And lots of people on Ancestry have got the wrong person in their tree because they haven't checked the birth cert.

Not as young as your girls, but my great great grandmother was 17 when she married a man in his forties (her first husband), who died and left her widowed in her early 20s. Huge age gaps were common in Irish farming communities, my great grandmother was nearly 20 years younger than ggf.

It's not changed that much really. My parents were 17 and 28 when they married in the 80s.

As DoAWheelie said, it hasn't really changed that much (although I'm clearly a generation older than her). One of my close friends married at 17 in the early 1980s.

While getting married that young is unusual it certainly did happen. For example, my great grandmother got pregnant at 16 and then married at 17. My paternal grandmother got pregnant at 17 and then married when she was 5 months pregnant with my dad.

Also, one of my mum’s older cousins got pregnant at 15 and then married at 16 to a US serviceman just at the end of World War Two. She became one of the first “US War Brides” to emigrate to the USA.

In comparison to the examples given in the OP, it was generally a case of young girls getting married because they had to in order to avoid being an unmarried mother.

Rewatching some of my fave programmes lately, and there's some age gaps that do make you go a bit 😳 and they're recent! (I know it's fiction...)
Chantelle and Geoff (the Oracle) in Benidorm.
She's 16 and he's 34 I think they say.
They're all just saying how lovely it would be for them to get together and encouraging a romance between them.
This was around 2010, possibly just before I think?!
Attitudes were definitely different even in the 80s/90s and early 2000s.

I've seen the marriage of a 12-year-old girl in Scotland in the 1700s. That too was among well-to-do pillars of the community.

Might dig out the ref in the morning, but meanwhile thank you for mentioning James Carmichael Smyth. As a Fife-born, Edinburgh university-educated physician to George III – and one involved in naval medical experiments – I must surely have heard of him, though my memory is letting me down just now. But he's smack in the middle of the social & professional circles of my core research subjects.

My great grandma married at 15. My great grandfather was 38 and in the army 😕. By all accounts it was a happy marriage and she wasn’t pregnant when they married. She was widowed fairly young though.

So here's my (just!) 12-year-old Mary Dudgeon getting married in 1726.

She was an orphan living with her older cousin John Cant, the Town Clerk of Inverkeithing, Fife, and the night before her 12th birthday she embarked on a dramatic elopement across the Firth of Forth.

“The 11th instant Miss Dudgeon was run away with by one Maclain a middle aged man, who its said is a Gentleman of a small ffortune near Inverness—her maid was in the plot—they went from Jo Cant’s house in a yoal at 12 that night and landed at the Murrays. You may imagine the sputter Jo Cant would be in next morning missing her—he offered 100 guineas to any who would find her, he sent to all airths—he went himself with Cockairnie’s son to Edin[bu]r[gh] and to make a long tale short she was catched at Corstorphing in a Hogny [hackney] coach designed to carry her westward and was to be marryed next night for she was 12 years old the 12th instant; so that till that day was at an end, it was not a legal marryadge. They lett Maclain goe and carried the Girle and her maid to Robt. Moubray’s house in Edinr. . . . . . . . I hear she is immediately to be marryed to Cockairnie’s eldest son.”
[Contemporary letter from the Countess of Moray.]

Mary was indeed married to "Cockairnie's eldest son" (who was aged 26) a few weeks later, had 12 children with him, and lived to the age of 80.

Mary and "Cockairnie" (real surname Moubray) were cousins. Their other cousins married into a family of Edinburgh-educated doctors which fielded a physician to George III and also the naval physician whose controlled, clinical experiment proved the effectiveness of citrus fruits in combating scurvy. Both doctors were named James Lind, and the one who was physician to George III was a close contemporary of James Carmichael Smyth. Smyth would certainly have known of both Doctors Lind, and probably knew them in person.

While searching for someone else in a newspaper archive, I came across a girl with the same name in Dublin who in 1847 married a 67 year old army colonel, when she was only nineteen. To make matters worse, she was his great-niece! So obviously they weren't that fussed about incest either...gross.

@TressiliansStone , that is really shocking to modern day sensibilities, isn't it.

I haven't looked into James Carmichael Smyth in any depth as my area of interest is the Holyland surname - Mary was a v distant relative of mine. She was the daughter of Christopher Holyland, a London vintner (and not, as the internet incorrectly has it, of Thomas of Bromley - that was her stepfather!)

She was a pretty thing -her portrait is in the national gallery of Scotland - hopefully this link will work

Mrs James Carmichael Smyth, died 1806 by George Romney | National Galleries of Scotland share.google/B68nICvMv5YDME14P

I have the opposite, my great grandmother was 19 years older than my great grandfather. Not sure what all was about.

Heh, yes, internet pedigrees are so often mince, aren't they.

Beautiful portrait! How lovely to find such a thing!

Holyland is an interesting surname. Does it derive from a crusader or pilgrim ancestor, do you think?

Blimey. Was that an actual blood great-niece, ie granddaughter of the groom's sibling?

People do use terms like "great-niece" socially when talking about family members of a lower generation, even when they are not great-nieces in the technical sense.

So one might see the term used when two people are only related through someone else's marriage; or when the one is the granddaughter of the other's nth cousin rather than sibling.

I hope it's that sort of explanation! Otherwise, eww...

The age difference is eww too, of course, although sometimes there's also an element of the bride anticipating her status as a wealthy widow... Which was actually one of the higher and more liberating positions available for a woman at that time.

My great grandmother left Ireland on her own at 16 to avoid being married off to a man in his 40s. She was married twice, possibly without bothering to dissolve the first marriage, which is the bigger family talking point.

Occasionally when very old men married young girls it was just for legal reasons i.e. so she would inherit and was not a 'real' marriage. Let's hope that was the case here.

My friend's father was her mother's schoolteacher. They had a long and happy marriage. I'm not sure exactly when the relationship started.

I run the Holyland one- name study and so have researched the name in depth, and I still don't know the etymology of the name. What I can tell you is that, afaik, everyone with that name in the world today is linked to a Holyland family in the village of Desford, Leicestershire, and the earliest confirmed sighting that I've found of them there is from a court pleading in the time of Queen Mary (the bloody, Tudor, one).

It's nice to think it suggests a pilgrim or crusader in the background, but you'd expect it to be a more common surname in that case, given how many people used to go on pilgrimages etc.

Oh how fascinating!

Oh yes. 15 year old child impregnated by her 38 year old stepfather (the mother had died), ended up in a very messy court case and the blame was firmly on the 15 year old who should have known better.

Of course it was.

Blimey. Was that an actual blood great-niece, ie granddaughter of the groom's sibling?
I don't know, says 'his sister's granddaughter'.

I don't have a subscription to the BNA where I saw it, just the little snippet they give you - his name was Colonel William Webster of Kingstown which I am assuming is Kingstown, Ireland, now Dun Laoghaire. But it seems to have been always against the law, so puzzling.

Aha, I've found it in the BNA "ists, although I don't have a BNA sub at the moment either.

Several versions give "Kingstown, N.H.", presumably New Hampshire in what is now the USA.

The jists read:
“the bridegroom has married his sister’s grand-daughter, which makes the bride wife to her great uncle, sister to her grandfather and grandmother, aunt to her father and mother, and great aunt to her brothers and sisters.”

Clearly in technical terms the bride becomes a sister-in-law to her grandparents, and aunt-by-marriage to her parents, but these qualifications aren't mentioned by the newspapers. Speaking purely socially, the bride becomes designated "sister" and "aunt" of her pre-existing relations.

So there's a fair chance that her grandmother was only socially the "sister" of the bridegroom. Perhaps the grandmother is the sister-in-law or stepsister (no blood relation) of the bridegroom?

Otherwise, as you say, surely it's illegal?!

I saw the NH thing too, @TressiliansStone but wondered why it was reported in so many Irish papers!

Oh if a family has Irish connections it would be normal for it to be reported in the Irish papers.

Also anything quirky like that gets picked up repeated regardless. In fact now that I'm looking, I've been able to find it in some English and Scottish papers too.