Four Generations

Studies four successive generations of life in a New England town during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the nature of family life and relationships in an agrarian society. A groundbreaking study in colonial history, this book gives a remarkably detailed picture of life in an early American community. It focuses on three basic and interrelated subjects largely neglected by historians—population, land, and the family—as they affected the lives of four successive generations. Applying demographic methods to historical research, Professor Greven presents new and unexpected evidence about the most basic aspects of family life in colonial America, and shows how these characteristics changed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.