UNMARRIED MEN

[wini]

I have been bogged down wtih some of the Ancestors and to get a breakthrough I have been looking at Siblings and trying to go from there.
In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century I am finding a lot of unmarried men, which isn't a lot of help.
Even in my Mothers family, she was one of six, 2 died in childhood and that left her with three brothers, 2 never married and one didn't marry until he was in his fifties.

My question is why were there so many unmarried men around this time? and I don't want any Chauvinistic remarks because I have probably heard them all before.

Behind every great man, there is a greater woman :

wini

[DavidWW]

First you need to research the relative proportions of male and female births, and then, just to complicate matters, I have a vague memory that, for some reason, one sex was slighly more likely than the other to succumb to death in infancy and childhood.

The result of that little exercise, and I'm near certain that Google will assist , will provide info on any imbalance in the sexes, i.e. available partners for marriage.

Secondly, for most folk in the 18th and 19th centuries, and some decades into the 20th C, the man didn't consider marriage until he could support the resultant family; meaning that the most frequent age at marriage for a man was late 20s, early 30s ......

If he couldn't find a partner, and remember that most folk married partners of like age, then it wouldn't take that long before the man was into his mid/late 30s and on the way to becoming a confirmed bachelor, and perhaps no longer that interested in going out and locating a wife who was much younger than him.....

Remember as well that there could be "competition" in the "market place", so to speak, with widowers with young weans competing for the affections of available young ladies. From a security point of view, many such young ladies might prefer, - I'd suspect, but can't prove it, - to "give their affections" to an older man who had already demonstrated that he could "hack it" in terms of earning a good living! Very much a generalisation

In addition, it was probably quite often the case that the unmarried son or daughter in a family eventually took on the responsibilities of looking after the parents to the exclusion of marriage.

David

[Pandabean]

Sorry I know this wont help but my Papa (McDonald) came from a large family of brothers and sisters. Most of the sisters married off and only a couple of the brothers, one being my papa obviously. There were about 3 brothers that went and stayed and worked in London. The was one who stayed in Kincardine on his own.

When I first heard this I thought that was uncommon with about 4 brothers out of maybe 6 or 7 never married.

[Thrall]

I seem to remember, at least when I learnt biology at school, that there were 21 or so boys born for every 20 girls, but the boys´mortality in early years was greater, thus evening things out, more or less.
One male can cope with more than one female as we all know, but this has been discouraged for better or worse in some societies for the last couple of thousand years............. Why did I write that? Anyway:

I have just this weekend unravelled a forward branch of my tree with two boys and two girls born in the eighteen nineties. Excitement mounted. Only one girl married however, to a well-off Englishman when in her mid thirties, and no bairns have appeared so far..........

Bring back bundling!

Guid hunting,

Thrall

[Davie]

Bring back bundling!

Sounds guid tae me Thrall.

Behind every great man, there is a greater woman

Is that greater as in fat Wini?

"If ye see a big fat wummin
staunin at the corner bumbin'
that's ma Maaaaamy"

Davie

[Thrall]

Bring back bundling!

Sounds guid tae me Thrall.

Davie

'Fraid I´m a wee bit past ma sell by date, but sounds rare for yersel and yer ilk.....

Tally ho!

Thrall

[wini]

Un married but not Celibate.
He died of Locomotor Ataxy, which, from what I can see seems to be an advanced form of Syphillis.

Maybe he would have been better off getting married.

wini

[ninatoo]

I also have found a lot of unmarried men in the tree, and I have often wondered why this was so. There seems to be almost one in every family! I used to think it was mostly on my mother's Irish side which has a background of the Irish tradition of waiting to have the means to support a family (as in old Ireland; they had to wait to inherit the farm because of the land laws back then, so I hear, and if they weren't the eldest son they had to STILL wait since they had to be able to make their own way). But I am finding a lot of single men in my Scots too.

And yet, sometimes a death certificate may not tell the whole story. I recently received some additional information about one of my bachelor ggg uncles (well it said he was single on his death registration) and it turned out he was in fact married and had split from his wife. I do not know if there was a divorce, but it seems by the time he died he certainly thought himself single. And there is another one who I knew had married (the wife was a bigamist) and on his death registration it said he was single.

And wini, I also have one single g g uncle who died of syphallitic ulcers or some such in the poorhouse, so I guess it was not that uncommon, sad to say.

Nina

[Ina]

I've noticed that even in recent years Scottish men didn't marry. My mother had four brothers who never married and my father had two brothers who never married.

Ina

[joette]

Mine must have followed the scripture that says "better to marry than to burn"
The only single ones are those that have died as young adults.Although in almost each generation there is one that manages to die as a "Bachelor" but they are definetly in the minority.
On the whole too they have long,happy marriages.I have noticed though that those who come from large families tend to limit the size of their offspring with many not having any.So you have parents with ten children having three or four grandchildren.Conversely those from small families-less than three seem to have loads of offspring.Especially the only
children.I guess we are just a perverse lot!!