ABSTRACT
T his essay attempts to link family history to urban history by examining the ways in which families adjusted to change in a growing city, Worcester, Massachusetts, between 1860 and 1880. 1 The analysis reveals that there were important contrasts between living arrangements of families in chronologically close but distinctly different stages of development, namely, families of newlyweds who had not yet produced children and those of young parents who recently had born a first child. It also emphasizes the importance of the context in which family development took place. Some recent studies of family and households have included comparisons between rural and urban areas, between industrial and commercial communities, and between ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’ societies. 2 Further work requires an even sharper focus, however, because one of the crucial issues in the field of family history involves analysis of how external conditions affected household organization and how interactions developed between the family process and community change. A budding but still small nineteenth-century city like Worcester provides an arena for such an examination.
