Family Values in Colonial New York

What can a computer-assisted analysis of more than 2,000 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wills tells us about the dynamics of family life in early America? In the hands of a thoughtful quantifier like David E. Narrett, a great deal. Narrett’s sophisticated study of inheritance in colonial New York City is a major contribution to an already distinguished body of scholarship in which historians have drawn on patterns of testation to probe the shifting social and economic strategies employed by early American families. ¹ There is no doubt that wills provide invaluable statistical evidence for documenting the changes in economic priorities and social values that only become evident over an extended period of time. As Philip Greven so eloquently demonstrated more than two decades ago, the shifting inheritance patterns he unearthed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Andover embodied nothing less than the waning authority of fathers over the lives of their adult sons.

But no matter how rigorous the scholarship, with wills there is always the nagging problem of their representativeness. Most provincial New Yorkers, after all, like the residents of New England and the Chesapeake, died intestate. On the other hand, even though only one-fourth or one-fifth of the male population in colonial New York City executed wills, an even smaller percentage left estates that were administered in formal intestacy proceedings. In other words, with or without a will, the vast majority of New Yorkers managed to bypass the formal English rules for intestate succession and distribute their property in conformance with their own ethnic traditions. Narrett argues quite convincingly that inasmuch as most of the property left by deceased New Yorkers was dispersed in accordance with deeply rooted customs, wills can shed considerable light on the lives of the intestate majority precisely because they are reflections of those very same customs. Of course, as he readily acknowledges, testators also shaped their wills to meet personal priorities and satisfy idiosyncratic desires. Yet the core of his analysis rests on the assumption that provincial wills were customized versions of broadly held understandings about life and property and can therefore help historians to map out long-term changes in what we might call family values. As he deftly demonstrates in this meticulously detailed book, not only can wills point up fundamental shifts in authority between both husbands and wives and parents and children but they can help us to discern the role of kinship and community in a testator’s constellation of values.

The scholarship in this narrowly focused study is impeccable. In this heyday of culture studies with their unsettling acceptance of the indeterminacy of texts, Narrett’s hard-edged precision stands as a refreshing affirmation of the benefits of an old-fashioned social science approach. The sheer scope of his evidence is impressive in both quantitative and chronological terms. It encompasses 37 wills recorded in New Amsterdam between 1638 and 1664; 1,619 wills recorded from the time of the English conquest in 1664 to the eve of the American Revolution; and for purposes of urban-versus-rural comparisons, more than 800 wills from Suffolk and Ulster counties. As one might expect, wealthy men made up a disproportionate share of the testators. Nonetheless, will-writers came from diverse ethnic and occupational ranks, including unattached seamen who made provisions for their mistresses or fellow seamen in anticipation of a long and dangerous sea voyage. Narrett buttresses the data he culled from wills with court records, deeds, tax lists, inventories, family papers, and registers of births, marriages, and deaths. These supplemental sources enable him to construct a richly informative appendix with tables that chart the gender, age, literacy, economic status, and ethnicity of most of his testators. An integral part of the whole study, the appendix alone is almost worth the price of the book.

In focusing on New York City as a locale for developing his data, Narrett has chosen wisely. From its...