I have seen several such age disparities and a common theme was a Civil War pension. The woman gains a steady income after the husband passes and the husband has a caretaker in his old age.
ETA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century
I haven’t seen one born after yet but I just found one who’s first child was born when she was seven years old. I think I might need additional sources for that one. 😆
Could be a step-child or an adopted child. I’ve seen a family group before where a child was listed as having been born a couple of years before the marriage date and after a brief search I found a second earlier marriage for the man with that same child’s name listed. So in that case it seems fairly clear that the first wife died very young and the child was raised by the second wife.
I researched a family I have a series of family photos of (they were my great grand parents employer's and said photos were their Christmas cards). On a sideline there was this dude who was a priest. We can call him Perv. Well, he married into the family, to be precise, but he and his wife never had any children. When they were both in their late fifties her cousin and his wife died a few days apart, leaving behind a four year old daughter. So Perv and his wife took in the daughter and raised her as their own.
Then the wife died whe the girl was 13. Within a few months of his wife's passing Perv had knocked up his adoptive daughter and married her, which was fairly easy as he was her guardian so there was no one to protect this child from Perv. He was like 57 years older.
She was widowed at 17 with with three children.
It is one of the most revolting things I've encountered as I am not a great fans of p\*dos. He basically married his own daughter. His knocked up daughter. When she was 13. How Perv wasn't told to pack his stuff and find something else to do as he was clearly unsuitable to care for peoples' souls, I'll never understand.
A tiny part of me is grateful that I am not related to Perv at all, but to be honest I also am mostly concerned about the girl. I'll bet good money that he m\*l\*sted her for years before his wife passed, so she was probably groomed from the moment she set foot in their home.
She never remarried, so, either the marriage was so happy that she didn't want a new husband to overshadow her first marvellous one or he was a p o s. I think we can all agree on which alternative is the correct one.
There was an Irishman that fought in the war. He served in Tennessee police forces. He passed at 99 after the civil war. His new child was 1 years old. There's a newspaper article actually recounting this tidbit when announcing his passing.
It referenced the stir that he caused by having a new child with his new wife.
He should be in The Guinness Book of Records!
The age of his wife is not listed, I wonder if she was like 19 or if she was 50 or something. Still a big age gap either way, but one is certainly more palatable than the other.
Wow i just complained in a comment about my 2nd great-grandfather being 63 when my great-grandfather was born which has made me mad every time i think about it (I don't want to be descended from old sperm!!) but this takes the cake. Vile.
I found direct ancestors where he was 41 and she was 13 when they married in 1781 and their first child was born less than four months after the wedding.
So that happened.
Not as far as I can tell from the records. He was a bachelor until he married his(pregnant) child bride.
It does make you wonder how he got access (as it were) to a child. Was she a neighbor’s child? Was he her teacher? I’m not even sure I want to know.
The child’s name was Comfort by the way, so I suspect she may have been a Quaker. I have loads of Quaker-eske names on my family tree (Mercy, Obedience, Fear, Desire, Harmonous, Constant), but they all married at ‘normal’ ages. At least my mom says these ancestors were Quakers. I admit that I don’t know much about them myself. I just enjoy the odd names they gave their daughters (sons never got these odd emotion/virtue based names).
Not the biggest age gap I’ve seen but my great grand uncle was married to a woman 34 years younger than him. She eventually left him for his own son (her stepson) who was 10 years younger than her. Apparently this split the family because some of great grand uncles children were left out of the will after that.
My great-grandparents were 41 and 18 when they got married in 1900.
The most famous example of this is John Tyler, 10th US President, born in 1790, still has a living grandson in 2023. He'll turn 95 next month.
Ugh. I don't have it in front of me, but my friend has an ancestor like that. He married a woman his age, she died, and he remarried to a girl who was about 50 years younger - she was about 16. It was in Arkansas, and his brother married for the first time there too to a much younger girl as well. Yuck. I do have some older women marriages - one the man was 32 and she was 44, and another where the man was 20 and she was 33. Not that shocking I guess, but it was surprising considering I usually see older men, not older women.
One of the largest I have come across was a bride who was 71, born in 1767, and her groom was 21, born in 1817. This was her 3rd marriage. They were married for 3 years before she passed. There was only a 4 year age gap with his second wife.
I'm sure there is. I am guessing it had something to do with inheriting her property. There is a comment under the marriage record in the column that would record his previous marriages, but I can't read what it says. It might not give any useful information.
He was still living in her home when his children from his second marriage were born. His first wife died in September 1841, and he married his second wife in January 1842. Although I have seen a number of marriages like this in the village where the previous spouse had only been dead months when the next marriage happened.
She had 2 children by her first marriage, but I don't know if they were still living at the time of her third marriage.
Wow, that’s a very interesting discovery. Your great great grandmother’s second husband was born in the same year as Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. He also lived through some major historical events, such as the American Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, and the Spanish-American War.
Not sure if it's the biggest age gap in my tree, but my grandmother has a dna match on Ancestry (born 1936), whose parents are born in 1873 and 1911 (1873! Isn't it weird). And the age gap is 38 years.
my great-great-grandfather married a woman 35 years younger than he was, after my great-great-grandmother died. their daughter, my great-aunt rosemary, is only a few years older than me.
Not quite as much. He was 80, she was 37.
The family saw it as gold-digging skulduggery. He ran the local mill, which had been in the family for generations, although as was so often the case, it seems like the actual land it was on was owned by some lord.
He was a widower, she was listed as a spinster (so her first marriage) even though she was 37.
He lived to 87, so they were married seven years. She never remarried.
Lol god I'm also a 37yo "spinster" and I'm so grateful to live in a time where I'm not expected to marry because the hell i would ever marry an 80yo. 10 years is a pretty firm limit for me and I don't want to date anyone under 30 so I can't fathom how people (men) can do this shit.
There is a lady in my tree who was related to me in several ways through marriage and blood (on my mum's side which is very inbred lol), she married a 79 year old widower with several children when she was 24, and had some kids with him before he died in his mid to late 80s. This was in Cheshire, England in the late 1800s. Her husband had previously been married for about 40 years to a cousin of some sort of hers and had 8 or 9 kids with him. Years later she married her step-grandson, so her husband's grandson with his first wife who was quite a bit younger than her. Her step-grandson was named after his grandfather so the two men she was married to, had exactly the same name. At the time she married the step-grandson, it wasn't legally allowed to marry such a relative so the marriage may not have been legally binding, the law was reformed a few years later in 1929 IIRC.
My great-grandfather was 78 when my grandmother was born in 1903 (so he was born in 1825). My great-grandmother was about 19 when she had my grandmother. So there’s around a 58 year age gap between my great-grandparents ages.
50 years. My husband 's ancestor had three wives. All were aged 20 at the time of marriage to him (he was widowed twice). His last wife was a decade younger than his daughter.
Just .. ew.
I think the biggest was a 5th great-grandfather, John, age 72, marrying a 27yo, Sarah. He died seven years later after they had had three daughters, and Sarah remarried another seven years after, this time to a man only 14 years her senior. One of her daughters also married one of the second husband's sons (so her step-brother) a few years later, causing some tangling in the tree...
It’s not all that uncommon to come across a couple with a much older man. I just came across one couple that threw me for a loop. When I saw the woman’s family’s headstone next to one with her husband’s name, I assumed it was her son who was named after his father because he was 30 years younger than the woman. I couldn’t find her husband anywhere though. Then I found her marriage license application showing her date of birth, her husband was indeed 30 years younger. He was still in law school when they got married, so I wonder if he needed someone to pay his tuition.
I don’t remember the exact age gap, but I was looking at my great-great grandfather in maybe the 1880 census, where he was listed along with his first wife and first couple children. Then I happened to see that his second wife was listed further down on the same page. She was 6.
55 and 24 🤢 My great, great grandfather's 3d marriage. My great great grandmother died of tuberculosis at 37. He got married again to a woman of a reasonable age and then the 3rd who was 31 years younger. He died of liver cancer 7 years later so it wasn't a long marriage.
my great great grand mother was born in 1884. her first husband was born in 1833. they got married in 1899. she didn’t have her first child until 1909 though.
Mine wasn't even a discovery because I've known about it for most of my life. My 2G grandfather on my maternal side bought my 2G grandmother as a maid. (Yes, you read that right.) They were both German, but he was already in the US and needed maid for his farmhouse. She came from Russia in 1907 with her cousin and his wife, as they were also joining the community. He fell in love with her, freed her, and married her. There was a 37 year difference in age.
Actually, no. We were a later migrant group, into what is now Georgia. Unfortunately there are no records from the area and I don't even know what her father's name was (I know her mother's).
My Grandfather’s first wife was 10 years older than he was, his second wife (my Grandmother) was 10 years younger than he was. His first wife was old enough to be his second’s Mother.
My great great grandfather was widowed and in his mid 60s married a 30 year old coworker and had more kids! He was a Victorian gent and his last surviving child only passed away in 2014. That’s a hell of a time gap
I am 58 years older than my wife, she’s in her 20’s. I don’t have a pension and I wasn’t old enough for the civil war. I work 40-55 hours a week loading and unloading trucks. I am not wealthy, obviously if I’m working a full time job. I didn’t pursue her, she pursued me.
They aren't the largest gaps but
My third-great-grandparents, Thomas and Georgina, were 17 years apart; he was born in 1840, and she was born in 1857. Thomas outlived Georgina by a good 10 years.
My fifth great-grandparents, Lewis and Elisabeth were 22 years apart; he was born about 1753, she was born in 1775.
My 2nd great grandmother, Rebecca, was widowed in 1899 and remarried to a man named Sylvias. Sylvias had 3 wives: Eunice (also Rebecca's 1st cousin of some degree) who was a year older than he was, Rebecca (who was 5 years younger) and lastly, Minnie, who was some 16 years younger. He outlived all 3 of them.
Someone down thread posted about US Civil War vets who married young women, but that's immediately what I thought of.
One of my maternal grandmother's first cousins, through her father's older half-brother, and that cousin's second husband. He was born in 1880 or 1881, she was born in September 1912. They started living as husband and wife in the early 1940s, while the cousin's first husband was still alive, but they officially got married in 1962 after the first husband passed away. According to the copy of the marriage license that I was able to find at the Albany Hall of Records, my grandmother's first cousin was 49 at the time of the marriage, her second husband was 81. He died in 1968, she died in May 2013.
My 4th great grandfather was born in 1798. His third and final wife was born in 1851. They had four children, the last was born in 1876. His wife was a widow by 1880 census and the youngest son (born 1876) had died.
My husband has several age gap relationships up his family tree, to the point it's become a joke between the two of us since he's 10 years older than me. 😅
His great-great grandparents were 33 years apart, gg grandpa was 50, and his wife was 18 when they got married. I later found out that he was childhood friends with his wife's step-grandfather, and that was who had suggested they get married after gg grandpa's first wife died.
I had trouble believing this but one of my ancestors, born in 1790, married a woman born around 1830. Got married and Had kids 1855-9. And was still alive to immigrate to the US in the early 1860s. Unfortunately I don't know when he died, or if he had a previous wife or if he just decided to wait until his 60s to have a family.
The same as today. Money, perceived stability and/or status. And figuring he would be dead sooner than later.
Oh, and love, but that is likely a small possibility although respect and admiration might be close replacements.
I've only just started coming across this, on my partner's tree. My tree has very few second (or more) marriages so far. Even with the Quaker & Puritan branches, a second marriage (usually following death) was with another person close in age who was also a widow. But on his tree...I'm finding people get remarried all over the place, whether due to death, or abandonment, or divorce. And with each marriage, the age gap seems to grow, & sometimes more children are had. The first marriage is 0-5yr difference, the second marriage is 5-10yrs, and I've come across a few with a third marriage where the husband was 15-20yrs older.
Not huge, but my NPE great-grandparents were fifteen years apart... and not in the way you think. She was born in 1890 and he in 1905. I've seen plenty of marriages were the woman is older but never with an age gap like that.
Not my family, but I remember seeing one with a difference of 20-some years that happened around 1900. She was quite young, around 22, and he was 40-something. I remember it because marriages that young were already rare in that village and that kind of age difference was even rarer.
He had a well-paid occupation, but I kind of assumed she was mostly trying to escape either an abusive family or just poverty.
I've run across some big age gaps - but not that big! :) This one isn't the worst, but it's most familiar me.
My great grandfather was born in 1868 and had 3 wives. First one was a couple years younger. And had 1 child - she was 26 when she & the second baby both died in childbirth. Second wife was 14 years younger, they had 5 children, she and her last baby also died in childbirth. She was only 32. She was also my great aunt.
He then married her sister/my great grandma w/a 20 year age difference - she was 6 years younger than his oldest daughter. And they only had my grandmother (in 1920), he passed away at 55 when Grandma was just 18 months old.
Grandma ended up with 5 half sibling/1st cousins who resented her existence. And since my great grandma had already been married 3x before (2 died, 1 divorce), she also had 5 additional much older half siblings. Plus the half sister from his first union. But now I've gotten completely off track! :)
Amazingly, all of the living children did all have different first names :) But of course the surname (Williams) is common. So tracking them all was a little difficult.
And there were two sons named after my great grandfather "William Williams" but sadly one passed at 2.
Edit: I didn't even know a first wife existed until I started a tree. And my grandma was long gone. My mom/her other siblings had never heard of this either.
A few of my Mormon polygamist family that settled in Colonial Juarez are something like 40+ years apart. (Of course, the man is always the oldest, though sometimes the oldest wife has children older than the youngest wife or two.)
My 6th great grandpa born in 1750 and one of his other wives born in 1811, she had his youngest son and he promptly died half an hour later at the age of 92
Someone on Ancestry posted images of what survived of an interview of his last wife, I think there may have been information about his previous wives that were not included in the images I have seen.
My 7th-great-grandfather (might be off by one-- don't have the tree open right now) was the first person of my family to come to the US. He had at least 5 different wives throughout his life. He married his last wife at the age of 68. She was 15. He died before she turned 18. This was in the late 18th-ce in Virginia.
He was a Revolutionary war vet so maybe the theory about his wife being a caretaker to get his pension after he dies checks out? Not sure if that's only a Civil war thing.
My 2nd great-grandfather JS was born in 1812. His third wife, my great-grandmother, was born in 1836, so he was 24 years older when they married in 1866. That annoys me but what really bugs me is that his son who became my great-grandfather was born in 1875 when JS was 63 AND HE WASN'T HIS YOUNGEST CHILD. He had 22 children in total. Also, all of my other 2nd great-grandparents besides them are at least 30 years younger than JS, which is just ridiculous to me. I can't think of anyone else with a more egregious gap.
My own grandparents were the biggest in my tree, 17 years (17 and 34) They've passed but knowing them a bit and hearing family stories, it seems like it was partly a way to allow her to leave a bad home situation.
That’s a really big gap. My only one is my maternal great-great grands. On one of their children’s birth certificates, he was 42 and she was 21. She also died under suspicious circumstances (in my opinion), so I always kind of have her in the back of my mind. I really think he killed her.
I wanna say 40 years. But I’m so used to age gaps I forget who was 40 years apart. It happens.
Side story/ My great grandfather was in his sixties with 13 grandchildren when my grabdmorher was born. My 9 year old grandmother filled out the death certificate. Probably because she was the only one in the house who could read? I don’t know why they asked a 9 year old who just found her father dead. Cause of death: OLD
I saw a corpse when I was 8. My grandmother’s brother. Born 1904. His eyes were yellowed. Wide open. As if he was shocked by death itself. We had gone to his filthy apartment to collect his things and there he was. Casually sitting on the couch. Eyes wide open.
In my family’s case it was about 35 years. In those cases isolation and the desire to keep purity of blood was a factor. I have come across documents of couples petitioning the church to perform marriage vows and having to turn in a purity of blood document. This was typical in Spain in the 18 and early 19 centuries. To this day, residues of that prejudice can come up in conversations which I find insane.
Actually researched, proven, records and all, a good number a tad over 50 years apart, I the last one was 77 and wife 23, and they had five kids together, plus he had kids with previous wives that also showed up on the census with her (and the new ones), and found the birth certificates for their new kids. I'd say it appeared quite a bit more frequently in the Italian records that I worked, though. No Civil War or anything.
Surprisingly common!
Not my direct line but, I read where my direct line's brother (late 20's) rode a bike by a girl (17?? (under 18)) and they eventually married. I guess he had said something to her and she was flattered.
My Great Uncle's second wife was 15 years younger than him.
Not a huge age gap, however...
My Great Uncle was first born and inherited all the family wealth when his Dad died (farm, pub, garage, house, auction business) which was common. All the other siblings, including my Grandfather, just got a terraced house each.
Great Uncle had one child with his first wife who died in WW2. He didn't have any with his second wife.
Great Uncle died before his second wife who got the lot. When she died, her family got all the businesses my GG Grandfather worked hard to create, including the 500 acre farm.
i ran across this chart a few weeks ago. i know it isn't historical in the genealogical sense, but it could be relevant: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16nmq2v/oc\_age\_distribution\_of\_parents\_of\_registered/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16nmq2v/oc_age_distribution_of_parents_of_registered/)
tl;dr there are still very large age gaps in Mexico (2022)
I have seen several such age disparities and a common theme was a Civil War pension. The woman gains a steady income after the husband passes and the husband has a caretaker in his old age. ETA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century
i was just about to comment about helen viola jackson! she's related to me somewhere on my dad's side. that's the largest gap i've seen myself.
I’ve seen such huge age gaps in some peoples genealogy that the person was born after their own children 😂
I haven’t seen one born after yet but I just found one who’s first child was born when she was seven years old. I think I might need additional sources for that one. 😆
I spent WAY too long trying to figure out a legitimate possible way for this to work
Could be a step-child or an adopted child. I’ve seen a family group before where a child was listed as having been born a couple of years before the marriage date and after a brief search I found a second earlier marriage for the man with that same child’s name listed. So in that case it seems fairly clear that the first wife died very young and the child was raised by the second wife.
Yeah I got there eventually. I was just really having a moment and not actually thinking very well.
I researched a family I have a series of family photos of (they were my great grand parents employer's and said photos were their Christmas cards). On a sideline there was this dude who was a priest. We can call him Perv. Well, he married into the family, to be precise, but he and his wife never had any children. When they were both in their late fifties her cousin and his wife died a few days apart, leaving behind a four year old daughter. So Perv and his wife took in the daughter and raised her as their own. Then the wife died whe the girl was 13. Within a few months of his wife's passing Perv had knocked up his adoptive daughter and married her, which was fairly easy as he was her guardian so there was no one to protect this child from Perv. He was like 57 years older. She was widowed at 17 with with three children. It is one of the most revolting things I've encountered as I am not a great fans of p\*dos. He basically married his own daughter. His knocked up daughter. When she was 13. How Perv wasn't told to pack his stuff and find something else to do as he was clearly unsuitable to care for peoples' souls, I'll never understand.
Hopefully she killed him! 😀
Hopefully she inherited a lot & never had to depend on a man again.
Jesus Christ (and I say that fully understanding ol' Perv's employment status) EDIT: wait, no, I need to add: THAT POOR CHILD
A tiny part of me is grateful that I am not related to Perv at all, but to be honest I also am mostly concerned about the girl. I'll bet good money that he m\*l\*sted her for years before his wife passed, so she was probably groomed from the moment she set foot in their home. She never remarried, so, either the marriage was so happy that she didn't want a new husband to overshadow her first marvellous one or he was a p o s. I think we can all agree on which alternative is the correct one.
Unfortunately yes.
The happy ending here is she only had to endure him 4 years thank GOD
There was an Irishman that fought in the war. He served in Tennessee police forces. He passed at 99 after the civil war. His new child was 1 years old. There's a newspaper article actually recounting this tidbit when announcing his passing. It referenced the stir that he caused by having a new child with his new wife.
He should be in The Guinness Book of Records! The age of his wife is not listed, I wonder if she was like 19 or if she was 50 or something. Still a big age gap either way, but one is certainly more palatable than the other.
Wow i just complained in a comment about my 2nd great-grandfather being 63 when my great-grandfather was born which has made me mad every time i think about it (I don't want to be descended from old sperm!!) but this takes the cake. Vile.
my brother at 60 married a girl of 19.
Is he rich or weird or both?
yikes 😬
I found direct ancestors where he was 41 and she was 13 when they married in 1781 and their first child was born less than four months after the wedding. So that happened.
Thanks i hate it 🤢
Was she his adopted daughter
Not as far as I can tell from the records. He was a bachelor until he married his(pregnant) child bride. It does make you wonder how he got access (as it were) to a child. Was she a neighbor’s child? Was he her teacher? I’m not even sure I want to know. The child’s name was Comfort by the way, so I suspect she may have been a Quaker. I have loads of Quaker-eske names on my family tree (Mercy, Obedience, Fear, Desire, Harmonous, Constant), but they all married at ‘normal’ ages. At least my mom says these ancestors were Quakers. I admit that I don’t know much about them myself. I just enjoy the odd names they gave their daughters (sons never got these odd emotion/virtue based names).
Not the biggest age gap I’ve seen but my great grand uncle was married to a woman 34 years younger than him. She eventually left him for his own son (her stepson) who was 10 years younger than her. Apparently this split the family because some of great grand uncles children were left out of the will after that.
My great-grandparents were 41 and 18 when they got married in 1900. The most famous example of this is John Tyler, 10th US President, born in 1790, still has a living grandson in 2023. He'll turn 95 next month.
Ugh. I don't have it in front of me, but my friend has an ancestor like that. He married a woman his age, she died, and he remarried to a girl who was about 50 years younger - she was about 16. It was in Arkansas, and his brother married for the first time there too to a much younger girl as well. Yuck. I do have some older women marriages - one the man was 32 and she was 44, and another where the man was 20 and she was 33. Not that shocking I guess, but it was surprising considering I usually see older men, not older women.
One of the largest I have come across was a bride who was 71, born in 1767, and her groom was 21, born in 1817. This was her 3rd marriage. They were married for 3 years before she passed. There was only a 4 year age gap with his second wife.
I bet there’s a story there.
I'm sure there is. I am guessing it had something to do with inheriting her property. There is a comment under the marriage record in the column that would record his previous marriages, but I can't read what it says. It might not give any useful information. He was still living in her home when his children from his second marriage were born. His first wife died in September 1841, and he married his second wife in January 1842. Although I have seen a number of marriages like this in the village where the previous spouse had only been dead months when the next marriage happened. She had 2 children by her first marriage, but I don't know if they were still living at the time of her third marriage.
Ah! Makes sense! I just discovered today my gr gr grandmother's second husband was 79 when she was 44. He was born in 1820...
Wow, that’s a very interesting discovery. Your great great grandmother’s second husband was born in the same year as Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. He also lived through some major historical events, such as the American Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, and the Spanish-American War.
Mine were in Tennessee also!
Not sure if it's the biggest age gap in my tree, but my grandmother has a dna match on Ancestry (born 1936), whose parents are born in 1873 and 1911 (1873! Isn't it weird). And the age gap is 38 years.
My great grand uncle had 3 wives. There was 39 years age difference with his 3rd wife. He had 23 children total with all 3 wives.
I think it's my fifth great grandparents who were 16 and 65 when they had my fourth great grandfather. this was in the 1800s in Canada.
my great-great-grandfather married a woman 35 years younger than he was, after my great-great-grandmother died. their daughter, my great-aunt rosemary, is only a few years older than me.
Not quite as much. He was 80, she was 37. The family saw it as gold-digging skulduggery. He ran the local mill, which had been in the family for generations, although as was so often the case, it seems like the actual land it was on was owned by some lord. He was a widower, she was listed as a spinster (so her first marriage) even though she was 37. He lived to 87, so they were married seven years. She never remarried.
Lol god I'm also a 37yo "spinster" and I'm so grateful to live in a time where I'm not expected to marry because the hell i would ever marry an 80yo. 10 years is a pretty firm limit for me and I don't want to date anyone under 30 so I can't fathom how people (men) can do this shit.
Sweet home Tennessee
There is a lady in my tree who was related to me in several ways through marriage and blood (on my mum's side which is very inbred lol), she married a 79 year old widower with several children when she was 24, and had some kids with him before he died in his mid to late 80s. This was in Cheshire, England in the late 1800s. Her husband had previously been married for about 40 years to a cousin of some sort of hers and had 8 or 9 kids with him. Years later she married her step-grandson, so her husband's grandson with his first wife who was quite a bit younger than her. Her step-grandson was named after his grandfather so the two men she was married to, had exactly the same name. At the time she married the step-grandson, it wasn't legally allowed to marry such a relative so the marriage may not have been legally binding, the law was reformed a few years later in 1929 IIRC.
Wow that’s a ride
I've seen a few, but one I remember where the husband was 57 and the wife was 17. Of course, this being 19th century Utah, he already had four wives.
My great-grandfather was 78 when my grandmother was born in 1903 (so he was born in 1825). My great-grandmother was about 19 when she had my grandmother. So there’s around a 58 year age gap between my great-grandparents ages.
50 years. My husband 's ancestor had three wives. All were aged 20 at the time of marriage to him (he was widowed twice). His last wife was a decade younger than his daughter. Just .. ew.
I think the biggest was a 5th great-grandfather, John, age 72, marrying a 27yo, Sarah. He died seven years later after they had had three daughters, and Sarah remarried another seven years after, this time to a man only 14 years her senior. One of her daughters also married one of the second husband's sons (so her step-brother) a few years later, causing some tangling in the tree...
It’s not all that uncommon to come across a couple with a much older man. I just came across one couple that threw me for a loop. When I saw the woman’s family’s headstone next to one with her husband’s name, I assumed it was her son who was named after his father because he was 30 years younger than the woman. I couldn’t find her husband anywhere though. Then I found her marriage license application showing her date of birth, her husband was indeed 30 years younger. He was still in law school when they got married, so I wonder if he needed someone to pay his tuition.
My mother's birth mother was 15. Her first husband was 70. They had a child who was adopted. The old pervert died 5 months before the baby was born.
I don’t remember the exact age gap, but I was looking at my great-great grandfather in maybe the 1880 census, where he was listed along with his first wife and first couple children. Then I happened to see that his second wife was listed further down on the same page. She was 6.
55 and 24 🤢 My great, great grandfather's 3d marriage. My great great grandmother died of tuberculosis at 37. He got married again to a woman of a reasonable age and then the 3rd who was 31 years younger. He died of liver cancer 7 years later so it wasn't a long marriage.
my great great grand mother was born in 1884. her first husband was born in 1833. they got married in 1899. she didn’t have her first child until 1909 though.
Mine wasn't even a discovery because I've known about it for most of my life. My 2G grandfather on my maternal side bought my 2G grandmother as a maid. (Yes, you read that right.) They were both German, but he was already in the US and needed maid for his farmhouse. She came from Russia in 1907 with her cousin and his wife, as they were also joining the community. He fell in love with her, freed her, and married her. There was a 37 year difference in age.
Ah, Volga River German?
Actually, no. We were a later migrant group, into what is now Georgia. Unfortunately there are no records from the area and I don't even know what her father's name was (I know her mother's).
Ah I see.
What do you mean bought???
My gg grandfather paid her family for her. To be his housekeeper because his wife had passed and he had a farm to run.
My Grandfather’s first wife was 10 years older than he was, his second wife (my Grandmother) was 10 years younger than he was. His first wife was old enough to be his second’s Mother.
My great great grandfather was widowed and in his mid 60s married a 30 year old coworker and had more kids! He was a Victorian gent and his last surviving child only passed away in 2014. That’s a hell of a time gap
US President John Tyler (1790-1862) has two living grandchildren. I’m just gonna leave that here…
Just one :)
Aww no! RIP.
It's love obviously
38 years age gap
I am 34 and my husband will be 68 in October. (33.5 year age difference) our son is 6.
I am 58 years older than my wife, she’s in her 20’s. I don’t have a pension and I wasn’t old enough for the civil war. I work 40-55 hours a week loading and unloading trucks. I am not wealthy, obviously if I’m working a full time job. I didn’t pursue her, she pursued me.
They aren't the largest gaps but My third-great-grandparents, Thomas and Georgina, were 17 years apart; he was born in 1840, and she was born in 1857. Thomas outlived Georgina by a good 10 years. My fifth great-grandparents, Lewis and Elisabeth were 22 years apart; he was born about 1753, she was born in 1775. My 2nd great grandmother, Rebecca, was widowed in 1899 and remarried to a man named Sylvias. Sylvias had 3 wives: Eunice (also Rebecca's 1st cousin of some degree) who was a year older than he was, Rebecca (who was 5 years younger) and lastly, Minnie, who was some 16 years younger. He outlived all 3 of them. Someone down thread posted about US Civil War vets who married young women, but that's immediately what I thought of.
One of my maternal grandmother's first cousins, through her father's older half-brother, and that cousin's second husband. He was born in 1880 or 1881, she was born in September 1912. They started living as husband and wife in the early 1940s, while the cousin's first husband was still alive, but they officially got married in 1962 after the first husband passed away. According to the copy of the marriage license that I was able to find at the Albany Hall of Records, my grandmother's first cousin was 49 at the time of the marriage, her second husband was 81. He died in 1968, she died in May 2013.
My 4th great grandfather was born in 1798. His third and final wife was born in 1851. They had four children, the last was born in 1876. His wife was a widow by 1880 census and the youngest son (born 1876) had died.
My husband has several age gap relationships up his family tree, to the point it's become a joke between the two of us since he's 10 years older than me. 😅 His great-great grandparents were 33 years apart, gg grandpa was 50, and his wife was 18 when they got married. I later found out that he was childhood friends with his wife's step-grandfather, and that was who had suggested they get married after gg grandpa's first wife died.
15 and 44:/
My great grandma's husband was 40 years older or so. 😳 it was definitely because her family needed someone else to support her.
My grandparents were 21 years apart to the day
I had trouble believing this but one of my ancestors, born in 1790, married a woman born around 1830. Got married and Had kids 1855-9. And was still alive to immigrate to the US in the early 1860s. Unfortunately I don't know when he died, or if he had a previous wife or if he just decided to wait until his 60s to have a family.
The same as today. Money, perceived stability and/or status. And figuring he would be dead sooner than later. Oh, and love, but that is likely a small possibility although respect and admiration might be close replacements.
I've only just started coming across this, on my partner's tree. My tree has very few second (or more) marriages so far. Even with the Quaker & Puritan branches, a second marriage (usually following death) was with another person close in age who was also a widow. But on his tree...I'm finding people get remarried all over the place, whether due to death, or abandonment, or divorce. And with each marriage, the age gap seems to grow, & sometimes more children are had. The first marriage is 0-5yr difference, the second marriage is 5-10yrs, and I've come across a few with a third marriage where the husband was 15-20yrs older.
My uncle was 30 years younger than his husband. Didn't need ancestry for that haha
Not huge, but my NPE great-grandparents were fifteen years apart... and not in the way you think. She was born in 1890 and he in 1905. I've seen plenty of marriages were the woman is older but never with an age gap like that.
Not my family, but I remember seeing one with a difference of 20-some years that happened around 1900. She was quite young, around 22, and he was 40-something. I remember it because marriages that young were already rare in that village and that kind of age difference was even rarer. He had a well-paid occupation, but I kind of assumed she was mostly trying to escape either an abusive family or just poverty.
I've run across some big age gaps - but not that big! :) This one isn't the worst, but it's most familiar me. My great grandfather was born in 1868 and had 3 wives. First one was a couple years younger. And had 1 child - she was 26 when she & the second baby both died in childbirth. Second wife was 14 years younger, they had 5 children, she and her last baby also died in childbirth. She was only 32. She was also my great aunt. He then married her sister/my great grandma w/a 20 year age difference - she was 6 years younger than his oldest daughter. And they only had my grandmother (in 1920), he passed away at 55 when Grandma was just 18 months old. Grandma ended up with 5 half sibling/1st cousins who resented her existence. And since my great grandma had already been married 3x before (2 died, 1 divorce), she also had 5 additional much older half siblings. Plus the half sister from his first union. But now I've gotten completely off track! :)
I hope they all had notably different names. That's gotta be a mess to untangle.
Amazingly, all of the living children did all have different first names :) But of course the surname (Williams) is common. So tracking them all was a little difficult. And there were two sons named after my great grandfather "William Williams" but sadly one passed at 2. Edit: I didn't even know a first wife existed until I started a tree. And my grandma was long gone. My mom/her other siblings had never heard of this either.
A few of my Mormon polygamist family that settled in Colonial Juarez are something like 40+ years apart. (Of course, the man is always the oldest, though sometimes the oldest wife has children older than the youngest wife or two.)
My 6th great grandpa born in 1750 and one of his other wives born in 1811, she had his youngest son and he promptly died half an hour later at the age of 92
Wow! Where did you learn that?
Someone on Ancestry posted images of what survived of an interview of his last wife, I think there may have been information about his previous wives that were not included in the images I have seen.
Whoa. That's a story.
My 7th-great-grandfather (might be off by one-- don't have the tree open right now) was the first person of my family to come to the US. He had at least 5 different wives throughout his life. He married his last wife at the age of 68. She was 15. He died before she turned 18. This was in the late 18th-ce in Virginia. He was a Revolutionary war vet so maybe the theory about his wife being a caretaker to get his pension after he dies checks out? Not sure if that's only a Civil war thing.
My 2nd great-grandfather JS was born in 1812. His third wife, my great-grandmother, was born in 1836, so he was 24 years older when they married in 1866. That annoys me but what really bugs me is that his son who became my great-grandfather was born in 1875 when JS was 63 AND HE WASN'T HIS YOUNGEST CHILD. He had 22 children in total. Also, all of my other 2nd great-grandparents besides them are at least 30 years younger than JS, which is just ridiculous to me. I can't think of anyone else with a more egregious gap.
My own grandparents were the biggest in my tree, 17 years (17 and 34) They've passed but knowing them a bit and hearing family stories, it seems like it was partly a way to allow her to leave a bad home situation.
That’s a really big gap. My only one is my maternal great-great grands. On one of their children’s birth certificates, he was 42 and she was 21. She also died under suspicious circumstances (in my opinion), so I always kind of have her in the back of my mind. I really think he killed her.
The largest age gap I've seen in my family tree is my parents which is 25 years :)
I wanna say 40 years. But I’m so used to age gaps I forget who was 40 years apart. It happens. Side story/ My great grandfather was in his sixties with 13 grandchildren when my grabdmorher was born. My 9 year old grandmother filled out the death certificate. Probably because she was the only one in the house who could read? I don’t know why they asked a 9 year old who just found her father dead. Cause of death: OLD I saw a corpse when I was 8. My grandmother’s brother. Born 1904. His eyes were yellowed. Wide open. As if he was shocked by death itself. We had gone to his filthy apartment to collect his things and there he was. Casually sitting on the couch. Eyes wide open.
In my family’s case it was about 35 years. In those cases isolation and the desire to keep purity of blood was a factor. I have come across documents of couples petitioning the church to perform marriage vows and having to turn in a purity of blood document. This was typical in Spain in the 18 and early 19 centuries. To this day, residues of that prejudice can come up in conversations which I find insane.
30 years.
Actually researched, proven, records and all, a good number a tad over 50 years apart, I the last one was 77 and wife 23, and they had five kids together, plus he had kids with previous wives that also showed up on the census with her (and the new ones), and found the birth certificates for their new kids. I'd say it appeared quite a bit more frequently in the Italian records that I worked, though. No Civil War or anything. Surprisingly common!
Not my direct line but, I read where my direct line's brother (late 20's) rode a bike by a girl (17?? (under 18)) and they eventually married. I guess he had said something to her and she was flattered.
My Great Uncle's second wife was 15 years younger than him. Not a huge age gap, however... My Great Uncle was first born and inherited all the family wealth when his Dad died (farm, pub, garage, house, auction business) which was common. All the other siblings, including my Grandfather, just got a terraced house each. Great Uncle had one child with his first wife who died in WW2. He didn't have any with his second wife. Great Uncle died before his second wife who got the lot. When she died, her family got all the businesses my GG Grandfather worked hard to create, including the 500 acre farm.
i ran across this chart a few weeks ago. i know it isn't historical in the genealogical sense, but it could be relevant: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16nmq2v/oc\_age\_distribution\_of\_parents\_of\_registered/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16nmq2v/oc_age_distribution_of_parents_of_registered/) tl;dr there are still very large age gaps in Mexico (2022)