Encyclopedia Dubuque
"Encyclopedia Dubuque is the online authority for all things Dubuque, written by the people who know the city best.”
Marshall Cohen—researcher and producer, CNN
Affiliated with the Local History Network of the State Historical Society of Iowa, and the Iowa Museum Association.
MARRIAGES (1880s)
MARRIAGES (1800s). In the mid-nineteenth century, marriage was considered one of the transitions between adolescence to adulthood. From 1833-1855, marriage licenses indicated the ages for men and women. Between 1835 and 1851, however, ages were recorded only occasionally and were never included after the 1850s. Federal census records from 1860 and 1870 were used in the research of Mack and Clarke.
In the early years of settlement around Dubuque, there were a number of very young brides. Although probably caused by the scarcity of women on this frontier, there were records of five fourteen-year-old girls and nine fifteen-year old girls becoming brides. In 1846, at the time of Iowa statehood, incidents of fourteen-year-old girls being married disappeared with a decrease in records of fifteen and sixteen-year old girls being married. The youngest girl married in 1870 was seventeen. There were two nineteen-year old grooms in 1860, but the remainder were twenty-years of age or older.
Most marriages for women were between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. For men, the ages were twenty-one and thirty.
---
Source:
Mack, Jennifer E. and Dustin S. Clarke, "Working Hard and Living Out" Adolescence in Nineteen-Century Dubuque," State Historical Society of Iowa, Annals of Iowa 79 (Fall 2020), p. 318