Relative Ages of Colonial Marriages Ages at first marriage in colonial America have attracted close attention from historians because these fairly accessible data shed light on various issues ranging from the nature of family structure and the process of inheritance to the roots of population growth. But although data on ages of marriage are useful, they tell us nothing about the marriage decision itself: they merely reflect when people who were able to marry chose to do so. This research note considers the role of the age differential in the choice of a spouse in colonial America. Clearly a multitude of factors-including wealth, social prestige, religion, and geographical location-must have influenced the choice of a spouse; but if age were a critical influence it would have affected the size of the marriage selection "pool" and, therefore, the weight of the burden imposed by any other restrictions. Laslett has suggested that a fairly small age gap between spouses, with a rather high proportion of wives older than their husbands, is one of four interdependent characteristics which have been part of the Western family for the last two or three centuries. The patterns that Laslett found in England and France are similar to those which existed in colonial America, but the extent to which cultural factors dictated these patterns is not clear. Although a consistent average age difference between spouses might seem to suggest some sort of cultural norm, it does not identify the mechanism behind that apparent norm.1