What is meaning of "Full" age on Marriage Cert

Lionheart · 14-12-2014 12:32pm #1

I have a marriage cert from the 1880's which record the man's age as 18 and the woman's age as "full".

I have plenty certs with "full" age for both parties and a few with the actual ages but this is the only one with the age for one and "full" for the other.

Does this mean she was 21 or over?

shanew · 14-12-2014 12:34pm

yes - age 21 or over

Lionheart · 14-12-2014 12:45pm

Thanks shanew. That confirms my opinion. Was this part of a civil statute?

Also the husband's age was just 17 years and 10 months at the date of marriage. Might be a silly question but would it have been unusual in the 1880's for a man under 18 to marry a woman over 21?

shanew · 14-12-2014 1:06pm

Lionheart wrote: »

Thanks shanew. That confirms my opinion. Was this part of a civil statute?

Also the husband's age was just 17 years and 10 months at the date of marriage. Might be a silly question but would it have been unusual in the 1880's for a man under 18 to marry a woman over 21?

A GRO cert is a civil marriage record, and the detail on ages is mentioned in the Act for Marriages in Ireland Act 1844. Other than both full, I've seen more marriages the other way around - i.e. groom full and bride under, or some both under 21. Dont know if anyone has worked out any stats., but based on the ones I've seen that marriage you mentioned seems the less common scenario age wise.

Lionheart · 14-12-2014 9:55pm

Thanks again shanew. I had a look at the Marriages (Ireland) Act 1944. Once a person reached the age of 21 it was no longer necessary to obtain consent from the father to marry.
The person I'm looking at got married on her 21st birthday. Perhaps that has some significance especially when she was marrying someone over three years younger.

Peregrinus · 15-12-2014 3:57am

It could mean that she was denied permission to marry by her parents, and so had to wait until she was 21, whereupon she married immediately.

Or it could mean that she agreed with her parents, or felt herself, that it was appropriate to wait until legal adulthood to marry.

Or it could be coincidence. Or they would have married about now anyway, but liked the idea of marrying on her birthday.

The more remarkable thing is not that the wife married on her 21st birthday, but that the husband married when only 17 years old. This was legal (with parental agreement) but pretty unusual in 1880s Ireland. In the years after the famine the average age at first marriage rose sharply; men in particular did not marry until they had already acheived whatever degree of economic security they could aspire to. In 1914 the average age at first marriage for a man was 33 (and 28 for a woman); I doubt that it was much younger in the 1880s. So a man marrying at 17 would be highly unusual unless (a) he was already economically very secure (i.e. he had inherited or would inherit considerable wealth) or (b) he was from a level of society in which he had no aspirates to any degree of economic security, or (c) a shotgun wedding.

braddun · 15-12-2014 4:32am

http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=479909.0

Lionheart · 15-12-2014 12:27pm

It was in fact 21 years after her baptism rather than her birth. No civil record exists as it was before 1864.

I assume the church would have checked the baptismal records prior to the marriage and may have conveyed to her the actual date so she would have known its relevance.

Peregrinus wrote: »

So a man marrying at 17 would be highly unusual unless (a) he was already economically very secure (i.e. he had inherited or would inherit considerable wealth) or (b) he was from a level of society in which he had no aspirates to any degree of economic security, or (c) a shotgun wedding.

They came from very poor backgrounds - she lived in one of the poorest and congested tenement areas of the city and he lived in a very working class area but not in a tenement. She moved to his area - a mile or so from her home and on the other side of the city.

I'm inclined to think that it was a shotgun wedding but as the surname is one of the most common there are literally dozens of possible births to check within 6 months of their wedding.

Lionheart · 15-12-2014 4:40pm

Just getting back to the age difference, in the 1901 census both husband and wife are the same age and in the 1911 census he is a year older than she is.

I'm curious as to why he would take a few years off his wife's age for the purpose of the census. Would this have been a common occurrence?

KildareFan · 16-12-2014 12:34am

Just getting back to the age difference, in the 1901 census both husband and wife are the same age and in the 1911 census he is a year older than she is.

Depends on the date of their birthdays; For example if he was born in March, he could be 25, at the time of the census in April, and if she was born in May, she could be 24.

Lionheart · 16-12-2014 12:58am

KildareFan wrote: »

Depends on the date of their birthdays; For example if he was born in March, he could be 25, at the time of the census in April, and if she was born in May, she could be 24.

Yes, I fully understand your point but she was actually over three years older than he and yet she was stated as being older in one census.( Birthdays were January and November so census in April would not have had any effect)

I was thinking along the lines that he may have preferred to be seen to be the elder in the relationship. My sense is that this would be quite a normal reaction for men a century ago but I really don't know.

Peregrinus · 16-12-2014 2:36am

Lionheart wrote: »

I was thinking along the lines that he may have preferred to be seen to be the elder in the relationship. My sense is that this would be quite a normal reaction for men a century ago but I really don't know.

It could be this, but actually these kinds of discrepancies are more usually the result of women understating their age, out of a kind of vanity. There are quite a few historic records of pension applications in which women turn up claiming/admitting to being several years older than they have been in the habit of saying, and saying that they have therefore reached pension age rather sooner than people might have been expecting.

If the lady in this case married at 21 in the 1880s, then in the 1901 census she might have been heading towards 40, and in the 1911 census towards 50, and in the conventions of the time (and to some extent today) youth was a prized quality in a woman.

pinkypinky · 16-12-2014 10:22am

Also, people are just wrong: they forgot their age, etc. They weren't as accurate as we are today.

KildareFan · 17-12-2014 1:27am

Also, people are just wrong: they forgot their age, etc. They weren't as accurate as we are today.

Yes - people didn't have handy birthcerts to refer to, and many were illiterate so they often guessed their ages.

What is meaning of "Full" age on Marriage Cert

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