ABSTRACT
In describing the spiritual and economic experiences of the aged we have gone a long ways towards capturing the nature of old age in early national America. However several facets of social experience—among them household arrangements and family life—must also be addressed. No institutions were more significant in the lives of the aged than the household and the family. This chapter begins an analysis of the elderly's domestic environment by focusing exclusively on the household; that is, the people who resided in the same dwelling with the aged. An old person's household largely determined the quality of an elderly person's daily life because it provided his or her most frequent social contacts as well as the setting for the basic tasks of living. The subsequent chapter complements and expands our understanding of the aged's daily experience by focusing on the nature and quality of their family lives. Composed of relations by blood or marriage, family members were often also household members. However, whether family members lived with their aged kin or not, their lives were interwoven with those of the elderly on many different levels
