"Love’s Young Dream," the painting created by American artist Jennie Augusta Brownscombe in 1887, captures many of the themes discussed in this dissertation. At rest on the front steps of a rural, frame dwelling, an aged mother regards her young daughter, looking hopefully at an approaching rider. An elderly father occupies a chair on the porch, marking places in his book with his fingers. He is not exactly involved in the unfolding romantic drama, but sits quietly nearby, ready to shake hands or dole out a dowry. This nineteenth-century scene could have taken place in either Canada or the United States. In both nations, the majority of families still lived in the countryside and nurtured their daughters until they married. At this point, it was up to Canadian and American young men alike to remove their new brides to a separate household of their own. In Canada and the United States, however, this process took place at different times. Uncovering these national differences helps to reveal the intense family dynamics which underlay Brownscombe’s placid scene.

This dissertation began simply as an exploration of the living arrangements of the North American elderly. However, in an attempt to understand differences in the Canadian and American elderly’s household patterns, this study grew to encompass the experiences of their children. Taking a comparative approach required that I focus upon patterns of inter-generational relations and co-residence in the two nations. Comparing Canadian and American patterns of inter-generational co-residence during the late nineteenth century bears many implications for the historiography of old age, as well as for North American family history in general. On the one hand, the Victorian Canadian and American elderly manifested similar general patterns of multi-generational co-residence. Most headed a household of their own, or were the spouse of the household head; many lived with as-yet unmarried adult children; and similarly small percentages of Canadian and American elderly persons lived in three-generation households. These general patterns seem to confirm arguments made by some Canadian historians that the two countries can be regularly examined as two parts of a whole region of common social norms.  

Nevertheless, the differences in the Canadian and American elderly’s co-residence with children were striking. Many more Canadian elderly men and women lived with offspring than did their American counterparts. This difference was rooted in the distinct behaviour of children north and south of the border. American sons left home about two years earlier than did Canadian sons. Since American sons married only about a year earlier than Canadian sons, it seems that many American sons spent a period of time between leaving home and getting married working on their own and living as a boarder. American male youths were able to do so by taking advantage of a higher demand for waged agricultural labour and greater opportunities to board with strangers. Responding to a more advantageous marriage market, American women married about two years earlier than did Canadian women. The Canadian and American elderly also manifested differences in the degree to which they lived with strangers. Fewer Canadian elderly persons co-resided with boarders, lodgers, hired labourers or servants than did their American counterparts. This distinction centres especially on aged North American women. The relative dearth of American elderly men together with greater economic opportunity and a more active market in boarding and lodging probably explains why larger numbers of American elderly widows remained heads of their own households while Canadian elderly women tended to stay married.

These differences suggest that Victorian Canadian and American family patterns were related rather than identical. In some instances, distinctions in household structure and life course transitions seemed to occur at a regional, rather than national level. Nevertheless, strong overall Canadian-American differences in inter-generational co-residence persisted. Even in Ontario and the American Old Northwest, those areas of Canada and the United States traditionally viewed as most similar, national differences in multi-generational co-residence remained significant.

This analysis of intergenerational kin co-residence in Victorian Canada and the United States suggests that we must complicate the notion of a North American family model, in two ways. First, we must not discount that Canada, in 1871, was a much younger nation, a much newer and smaller collection of communities than her neighbour to the south. Differences between the two nations in terms of geography and timing of settlement gave rise to differences in population growth and economic expansion. For decades, Americans had found ways to move west and take their national border with them. In contrast, most Canadians who wished to move on were forced to travel south to New England, New York, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. By the late nineteenth century, the older American communities of the northeast had developed urban, industrial economies while the vast majority of Canadians still worked in agriculture. Even in the countryside of the northern United States, American farming systems differed in ways which ultimately influenced household structure. Any continental treatment of Canadian and American families and households must account for these national differences.

We must also complicate the nineteenth-century North American family model by conceiving it as a continuum, rather than a type. Nancy Folbre conceptualizes young women’s living arrangements as part of a continuum of residential independence. This concept lends itself well to the study of mature families in North America, who were variously positioned on a similar residential continuum. Although the basic contours and structures of family life were consistent across nineteenth-century North America, young and old family members in Canada and the United States experienced various degrees of autonomy. Canadian young men and women remained in their parents’ households somewhat longer than did their American counterparts. American elderly women lived as widowed heads of households to a greater extent than did Canadian elderly women. Whether the tendency for American generations to live apart in greater numbers is rooted in preference or the economic opportunity to do so remains to be resolved. It would seem that young American men faced greater opportunities to leave home early; those opportunities, together with the relative surfeit of young American men, also enabled young American women to marry at an earlier age. However, perhaps attempting to order American family members’ choices and opportunities is a reductive and thus futile activity. It may be that American mature family members’ spirit of independence and their opportunities to live independently evolved simultaneously.

The integrated census data which formed the basis of research in Chapters Two to Five made many things possible, but they also encourage a certain blindness. These microdata enabled me to summarize and compare Canadian and American family behaviour. They also facilitated my efforts to understand household patterns from the perspective of the individual, and to survey changes across the life course. Many of the similarities and differences discussed in these chapters were made visual through plots, and we could see arching upwards or falling downward across the page the rising numbers of widows and widowers in the population, or the falling percentages of children living with their parents. The quantitative data can make the behaviour of nineteenth-century Canadians and Americans, along with their similarities and differences, seem mechanical, regular, predictable. Knowledge of family dynamics, the arguments and agreements, the support and conflict can be lost in this information. 

As a result, Chapters Six and Seven focused on the testimony of individual residents of mid- to late-nineteenth-century Ontario and Ohio who kept diaries and wrote letters. These literate sources reveal Canadians and Americans at their most selfish, and their most generous. They demonstrate that residential choices and inter-generational relations were not always the result of mechanical decisions or pragmatic calculations. The aging widow, Jane Tweedie, lived on a farm with four unmarried sons aged 30 years or more. The sons were old enough to have married, and could have courted the female friends of their five adult sisters; in addition, Jane Tweedie possessed 500 acres, more than enough to endow each son with an ample homestead. However, Jane did not follow the pattern of her peers, Mary Caul or Jane Straughn, and transmit land to her sons. Perhaps Tweedie did so out of a desire to retain control of her land, a desire that was both selfish, from her sons’ perspective, and perhaps personally prudent. Other examples of seemingly irrational, adventuresome, spontaneous or contentious residential decisions and inter-generational relations abound in these sources. Ned Straughn and Alex Barrington left the security of family to explore unknown options in other states. Nell Straughn neglected her own housework when her dying mother needed her full attention. William McKenney attacked his employer and landlady, Mary Caul, when she did not concede control of her farm. William Pinkerton spent hours revising his dead mother’s poems and trying to have them published. Samuel and Charles Jarvis tangled with their mother over the resolution of their father’s estate. Nineteenth-century Canadians and Americans were not predictable automatons. On the other hand, as often as they acted out of love or out of hate, they also planned and organized: they wrote wills, they saved money, they constructed new homes. At various times, Victorian Canadians and Americans alike acceded to, coped with, maximized, ignored or transcended the structures created by demographic parameters and economic opportunities.

Although the diaries and letters examined in this dissertation did not constitute a sufficient number to yield systematic Canadian-American contrasts, insights derived from these sources help to contextualize the quantitative differences observed in the living arrangements of the elderly in these two nations. The documentary evidence from Ontario and Ohio demonstrates that parents and children often maintained close ties, even when they did not live in the same household. Relationships with siblings, friends and neighbours could prove crucial if extensive inter-generational kin networks were absent. Gender norms and blood ties could also determine the type of support exchanged between and among kith and non co-resident kin. However, physical proximity proved an even more powerful influence on the amount of time parents, children, friends and neighbours spent together, time which could in turn determine their emotional closeness. It seems that parents, children and friends who lived next door or down the street from one another spent more time together and extended more mutual support than did those separated by a two hour ride, who were nevertheless physically, and thus socially, closer still than generations who lived the distance of a day’s journey. For some individuals, whose personal needs were more abstract or philosophical, such distances did not matter but for others, it did. If the length of a yard, a street, a county road and a stretch of railroad track made a difference in inter-generational relations, think what the breadth of a carpet or kitchen floor meant. In essence, the conclusions drawn in Chapters Six and Seven demonstrate that the Canadian-American distinctions demonstrated in Chapters Two to Five must have been significant indeed.

The role of physical proximity in inter-generational relations bears potent implications for the tenor of social and family life in Victorian Canada compared to that in the United States. Let us forget for a moment the reasons why Canadian children left home later than their American counterparts, and whether they would have left home earlier had the family lived in the United States. In certain respects, the way Canadian children would have behaved in another setting is not as important as the nature of their existence, just as it was, in the given Victorian Canadian setting. Michael Katz argues that the emotional ties between older parents and children who lived away from home must have been weaker than they would have been had those children remained at home. Is it possible that collective emotional differences between Canadian and American families resulted from these structural differences in living arrangements? Did Canadian young adults in the late nineteenth century chafe against their parents’ control over their destiny? Did their periodic trips to the United States make them envious of the more plentiful opportunities of their American peers? Could tensions within Victorian American families have been on the whole less in a regime in which older parents exerted decreasing influence over their children, and in which the elderly could rely more on their own rising wages and less on the traditional family economy to support themselves? Perhaps the Canadian setting, whose more restricted economic environment required a lengthier effort by parents and children to establish their children, fostered in turn a more conservative Canadian family ethos. To reverse a sentence at the end of Chapter 4, the fact that Canadian family members may have behaved differently had they lived in the United States does not obviate the possibility that their more interdependent behaviour in Canada constituted a national cultural trait. The same could be said about American families, for whom the economic and demographic opportunity to live separately may have nurtured more independent attitudes. Comparative demographic history not only illuminates family and household patterns but also inspires questions about the connections between social structure and emotional life.