ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the evidence which would seem to contradict Stone’s assertions about family relationships in seventeenth-century England, in an English congregation in Dublin, and in some Scottish ministers’ families. Much evidence of the responses of individuals to deaths of members of their families is to be found in diaries, spiritual autobiographies, and religious testimonies. In seventeenth-century England the death of a husband or father could mean a radical change in a family’s material circumstances. Grandparents are naturally the focus for connections between aunts, uncles, and cousins but in the seventeenth-century it was probably unusual for families to contain more than two generations. The incidence of death inevitably affects the experience of death and thus of grief. There was a difference between urban and rural mortality and the economic fluctuations of the period combined with epidemics did make the experience of death more catastrophic in some areas than others.
