YOUTHFUL WEDDINGS

In primitive days men and women - if they could be called men and women - inter-married at an earlier period in life than they do now.

Oftentimes girls at fourteen and sixteen years of age were given in marriage to youngsters from nineteen to twenty-one, and in some instances to men of mature age. Instances were known, and are known to this day, of girls becoming mothers before arriving at the age of sweet sixteen.

In is also a fact that marriages, considering the population, were far more frequent than nowadays. Computing the number of marriages in 1797 and 1800, and up even to 1810, with a corresponding regard to numbers, the list of marriages annually at this modern day, to correspond with the list in those years, would reach fully fifteen hundred, if not more, per annum.

History of Henderson County, Kentucky by Edmund L. Starling, pg 99