Over the life cycle, an adult in early modern Europe could become a spouse, widow or widower, single parent, and then once again a spouse, with the possibility of repeating the cycle, as remarriage rates hovered between one-fifth to one-third of marriages. If a child in early modern Castile lived past its first birthday, he or she had more than a one in three chance of losing at least one parent to death's scythe before adulthood. By their very nature, families evolve over time as children are born, grow, and leave home, but the early modern stepfamily experienced further periods of change when a parent died and the surviving spouse entered into a union with a new partner. For the child, the introduction of a stepparent into the household meant the possibility of siblings (either stepbrothers and stepsisters or newborns) from the remarried couple. Stepfamilies literally ‘embodied time’, as their very existence resulted from the changes death and remarriage had created.

The stepfamily in early modern Spain had many configurations, first disrupted, then reassembled, enlarged, and diminished in a pattern that could be repeated over generations. The social connections, economic partnerships, and even emotional attachments between the family members that entered and exited the life of a child or adult can sometimes be glimpsed in the archival record as families struggled with inheritance and distribution of property.