15 These tests for contraception within marriage include age-specific intramarital fertility, total marital fertility, the wife’s age at last birth, intergenesic intervals, completed family size, and fertility by age at marriage. Family reconstitution studies have been completed by the author and his students and research assistants for the New England towns of Concord, Brook-line, Nantucket, Hampton, Windsor, Milford, Waltham and Boston. Other studies have been done elsewhere for Salem, Ipswich, Sturbridge, Dedham, Andover, Rowley, Deerfield and Hingham. All yield firmly negative results for contraception within marriage before 1790, except Nantucket with its large Quaker population, and one cohort in Hingham. The data will appear in volume four, Deep Change: America’s Age of Cultural Revolution.
16 J. Potter, “Growth of Population in America, 1700-1860,” in Glass and Eversley, eds., Population in History, 647.
17 Sewall, Diary, I, 458; 6 Jan. 1701/02.
1 Many studies of naming in New England have been completed, by different methods but with broadly similar results; see George Stewart, “Men’s Names in Plymouth and Massachusetts in the Seventeenth Century,” University of California Publications in English (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1948); Daniel Scott Smith, “Childnaming Practices, Kinship Ties, and Change in Family Attitudes in Hingham, Massachusetts, 1641 to 1880,” JSH 19 (1985), 541-66; D. H. Fischer, “Forenames and the Family in New England: An Exercise in Historical Onomastics,” Chronos I (1981), 76-111, also published in Generations and Change, eds. Robert M. Taylor, Jr., and Ralph S. Crandall (Macon, 1986), 215-42; David W. Dumas, “The Naming of Children in New England, 1780-1850,” NEHGR 132 (1978), 196-210; Donald Lines Jacobus, “Early New England Nomenclature,” NEHGR 77 (1923), 10-20; John J. Waters, “Naming and Kinship in New England: Guilford Patterns and Usage, 1693-1759,” NEHGR 138 (1984), 196-210.