MFH Home
  Family Trees
  Records
  Wills
  MIs
  Studies
  Memories  
  People
  Places
  Related Families
  Odds & Ends
  Mail David

The conclusions which have been drawn about the MAY family of North-East Hampshire and Mid-Berkshire between 1630 and 1830 can be summarised in the following fourteen points:

• The family may have been of the Royalist persuasion, and escaped to the Isle of Wight during the Civil War.
• The family was of a high-status throughout the period, initially as yeomen, some branches later becoming elevated to gentlemen.
• The individual families, like most gentry, had large families, though this decreases across the period. Wet-nurses may have been employed by some branches.
• The family were fond of and attached to young children, at least from the early eighteenth century, despite high mortality rates.
• The family was concerned to provide an education for their children.
• The family provided eldest sons with secondary estates while their fathers still held the primary estate. There was concern that the eldest son should be provided with a living.
• The family provided younger sons with estates on which to establish themselves, or with a trade. All sons were assured financial security.
• Younger sons were able to rise to equal or above the status and wealth of their eldest brothers. Being less well-off, they were given an impetus to improve themselves through desirable marriages and diverse financial investment and business dealings: opportunities being plentiful in the towns where many of them lived.
• Eldest sons remarried at the status of their fathers. They were inherited only at maintaining the primary family estate for future generations. Thus there was little money for outside investment.
• The family was concerned with providing financially sound marriages for their daughters, who were not to inherit land.
• The family was also concerned with providing financially sound marriages for their eldest sons, so the family name would continue. These were often, if not always, accompanied by marriage settlements. Younger sons may have had to find their own wives.
• The family married at quite a late age.
• The family treated widows and widowers very differently. Widows were provided for after their husbands’ deaths, but were expected not to remarry, unlike widowers.
• The family had a very practical attitude to death, and were aware of their duties to those still living. Life expectancy increased over the period.

Next