In the whole, gathering effort to promote the historical study of family-life, one approach – an essentially ‘quantitative’ or ‘demographic’ approach – seems to have largely predominated. Perhaps this is fitting, since some of the most immediate and elementary questions about the family do indeed present a quantitative aspect. In this chapter, I propose now to examine the relation between the demographic or quantitative approach and what I would call a psychological one. What I have to offer is quite fragmentary – no more than a tentative and incomplete sampling of some work currently in progress. Hence my rather informal style of presentation, and the purposely cautious subtitle, ‘A Personal Report.’

When I first came to the study of family-life, and more specifically family-life in colonial America, the question of household size and membership was an open one. The notion that maybe there were quite a few ‘extended’ households around still seemed to have some life in it, particularly with reference to the seventeenth century, the period of settlement as such and immediately thereafter. My work on Plymouth Colony was initially directed right to this point; and I might add that Professor Greven was doing very much the same thing with his materials on Andover in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Our findings, it seems to me, were really very similar – though we have managed to keep arguing about their meaning ever since.