ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one particular group–the Puritan ministers of New England. Historians are treating the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as one unit without really considering if there were major changes in societal reactions to aging during that period. The chapter also focuses on the literature on Puritan ministers as well as on aging in colonial America in order to suggest some of the possible changes in the status and treatment of elderly ministers. The combination of the closeness of the remaining first-generation ministers to their parishioners as well as their own financial ability to care for themselves in old age appears to have minimized much of the difficulty experienced by subsequent generations of aging ministers. Perhaps some of the differences of opinion may stem from the highly favorable image of the role of the elderly in colonial America as exemplified and created by the rather unique experiences of the first-generation ministers.
