Young marriage in your family?

[Skjaldemjøden]

How old were your youngest ancestors, male and female, when they became parents?
My great-great grandmother was 15 when she became pregnant in 1855. The father of her child was a 28 year old who worked at her parents' farm. To hush the situation her parents married them off five months before she gave birth at 16. Her father died a few months later, and so her husband went from a poor farmhand to a wealthy farm owner relatively fast in life. They ended up having ten children and a fairly long and surprisingly happy life together, celebrating their 65th anniversary (called krondiamantbryllup in Danish) before passing away exactly a year apart.
Another female ancestor, a great x6 grandmother, was also impregnated at 15, in 1785, by a Norwegian soldier. Her life was much more like you'd imagine. The father of her child ditched her as soon as he heard the news (and got another teen pregnant the next year in a neighboring parish, whom he graciously married seven months into her pregnancy). I read in a book of the methods they used to extract the names of illegitimate fathers at the time, which included starving and chastising. Girls were also sometimes confined to monasteries (not unlike the notorious Magdalene asylums of Ireland). After giving birth the baby was taken from her to be raised by her mother and step-father (her own father had died when she was an infant), while she was sent to work as a servant in a distant parish. Years later her parents organized her marriage to a widowed fisherman 17 years her senior, who left her a poor widow in her 50's.

As for my youngest male ancestor I have no interesting stories. The titleholder was probably 18 or 19, married and ethnically Danish. My Jewish ancestors entered matrimony and had children in their mid or late 20s as far back as records go (which is perhaps a contributing factor to their good finances).

[joanna_38]

Not my mom or dad, but my mom's sister had my cousin & got married at 18 years old.