New England Weddings in my Ancestral Line: December 1st through 7th

Three of my direct ancestral couples married during the first week of December: 6X great grandparents Jonathan Palmer and Mercy Manwaring were united in Stonington, Connecticut, on December 1, 1706; 8X great grandparents John West and Renew Carpenter married in Rehoboth, Massachusetts on December 4, 1703; and 7X great grandparents Jonathan Aldrich and Mary Wilson wed on December 4, 1740 in Smithfield, Rhode Island.

The first paragraph of Old-Time Marriage Customs in New England by Alice Morse Earle published in The Journal of American Folklore in 1893 sets the stage for a wedding:

This excerpt from  Pamela McArthur Cole's article on New England Marriages,* gives us an idea of the traditional setting for weddings.*

Also my 7X great grandmother Sarah Nutting, left widowed by my ancestor Jonathan Farnsworth five years earlier, married John Stone on December 7, 1698, in Concord, Massachusetts.

*These two articles were originally published one after the other in the same issue of The Journal of American Folklore. Both are worth reading although I don't think either would meet modern standards of scholarship.


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