In her book The female line, which I read and reviewed recently, Margaret Ward mentions that (in Britain)
"in the first half of the 19th century, about one third of first children were born within eight months of marriage. It was a 'custom' in some areas (particularly when children were valued for their earning capacity) for marriage only to take place when a woman was pregnant, the idea being that she had thus proved her fertility."
Well,this was news to me, but around the same time I realised that we have a blatant example of a very pregnant bride in the September 1826 wedding in Krefeld. Ward's remark made me wonder if I can back up this observation with statistics from my family tree. So let's see.
Trouble is there weren't many wedding photographers in the first half of the 19th century (with photography only having been invented in 1824), so here's a Victorian wax model instead, from an exhibition on medical illustrations I saw in the Science Museum London in 2012. Own photo.
Among my own great-great-grandparents, we have eight weddings happening between 1850 and 1880, including:
3 cases where the gap to the first birth is less than eight months,
3 where it's more than 9 months, and
2 cases where we're data deficient.
Of the three pregnant brides, one must have been quite obvious, with the child born two months and four days after the wedding, one was intermediate with five months two days to go, and the last had six and a half months till giving birth. Note that if the oldest child we know about was born several years after the wedding, that counts as data deficient, as there may well have been a pregnancy before that one.
One generation back, we have 14 happy couples (16 minus two serving duplicate functions because of cousin marriages two generations down) getting married between 1820 and 1852. Here we have:
4 cases including 3 pregnant and one with a child born before marriage
6 not pregnant
4 data deficient
Among the pregnant brides, the record keeper is the very fertile mother of the Krefeld clan, who gave birth eight weeks and two days after her wedding. Close behind follow my Silesian name line ancestors with three months and eight days gap. The third pregnant bride gave birth seven months and three weeks after her wedding.
One generation further back we have 28 weddings between 1788 and 1823, of which:
2 pregnant
3 not pregnant
23 data deficient
One pregnant bride was the mother of the Krefeld one above, and similarly advanced, giving birth exactly two months after the wedding. Those Catholics at Krefeld appear to have had a special take on the moral norms of their time ... The other had 5 months and 23 days between marrying and giving birth.
So overall, we have data for 21 brides, of whom eight were pregnant (38%), one had an extramarital child. So yes, I can confirm the statistic. I realise that this calculation excludes the married couples who turned out to be infertile, but there is plenty of space left to support my headline claim of one in three. Searching for this online, I also found claims of 40% of first children being born suspiciously early. Also, if premarital sex was used systematically to avoid infertility, it must have had a significant effect on bringing the risk down, so I feel this all fits together quite nicely.
Note that these ancestors are spread out over five different regions (all except Hunsrück and Palatinate). We have two couples from Krefeld, three from three different places in East Westphalia, and one each from Odenwald, Baden and Silesia. There were Catholics involved in four of the marriages, two mixed, and two purely Catholic, all others were Protestants.
So this small sample is geographically representative. For a larger sample specific to one place, one could look at the residents books listing all the births/baptisms of each resident family, ideally together with the wedding date, so from these one could get a lot of datapoints very quickly.
My famlily history index pages: people -- surnames -- places -- migration events
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