Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City.

The study of inheritance has become an important avenue into the inner workings of family life in early America. Probate records, especially wills, have been analyzed for information used to reconstruct the structure and size of the family, and to investigate the bonds between husbands and wives, parents and children, and testators and their relatives and neighbors. Studies of inheritance in New England and in the Chesapeake colonies have shown that the distribution of property at death was a complex process guided by a combination of cultural traditions, economic circumstances, and legal realities, and that i varied in significant ways from community to community. David D. Narrett's stud of inheritance in New York City before the Revolutionary War contributes to thi literature. It is doubly valuable because it concentrates on an understudied region, the middle colonies, and because it is the first study of inheritance i any major colonial city.

Narrett's analysis draws on a quantitative examination of all extant New Amsterdam testaments before the English conquest in the mid-17th century, and all testaments prepared by Manhattan residents through 1775. Some of these will come from rural districts of the city, but the largest number were prepared by urban residents, and are the major source for the book. In addition to the New York City wills, testaments from two rural regions were also consulted for comparative purposes, the first a group of predominantly Puritan towns located on Long Island, and the second a group of primarily Dutch and Huguenot communities located north of Manhattan on the Hudson river. Narrett also makes an extensive use of other primary sources (in both English and Dutch), includin vital records, tax lists, administration papers related to intestacy, estate inventories, deeds, court records, and family papers.

Although not conveyed in the title, Narrett focuses on the testamentary practices of the colony's Dutch inhabitants, charting the ways in which their inheritance customs were transformed under the English legal system. Dutch and English inheritance laws differed dramatically on three important matters: marital property, primogeniture, and the parameters under which heirs were selected. Unlike English common law, which favored children over widows and son over daughters, Netherlandish custom recognized that ownership of the family estate was shared by both spouses, and favored the rights of the widow over those of her children. Dutch custom also followed a tradition of equity in bequeathing property to male and female heirs. Finally, Dutch testamentary practices called for forms of social intervention--such as the appointment of male guardians for children who had lost either parent--not found in English common law.

After the establishment of a new court system based on English legal procedures in 1691, Dutch law no longer had any formal standing in New York. But the English authorities allowed the Dutch colonists a great deal of freedom to maintain their own inheritance traditions while learning to adapt English practices to their own purposes. As a result, during the first fifty years of English rule Dutch men (and some women) gradually embraced English legal forms while uniformly bequeathing property following Netherlandish practices. For example, the Dutch abandoned the use of the mutual will (which was written jointly by both spouses) by the 1690s, but Dutch men continued to use their legal prerogatives under the common law to ensure their widow's authority over the family estate and postpone their children's inheritance until her death.

The perpetuation of Dutch custom under English law into the early 18th century had a significant impact on the status of New York City's Dutch women, especially widows. In the other colonies, with some variation, widows usually received their "thirds" as mandated by common law, but the death of her husband almost always meant that her status in the family declined from that of the helpmate of the head of the family to an elderly female dependent, a "relict." Dutch custom, in recognizing her equal power over the family's common property, ensured a measure of authority for Dutch women not found in the other colonies. Daughters also fared better under Dutch practices than English because of the custom of equity regarding inheritance.

In following their own cultural customs even while adopting English legal forms the New York Dutch resisted adopting English conceptions of family property for several decades. But by the 1730s Dutch husbands tended to exercise their testamentary power in favor of their children and at the expense of their widows. Wealthy Dutch merchants, like merchants who were members of the city's other nationalities, were most likely to limit their wives' portions, signifyin that their concerns and actions had less to do with their ethnicity than with their economic position within the colony. Increasingly, the inheritance practices of 18th-century New Yorkers followed those of the gentry and professional classes in the other colonies, where a new style of family life wa emerging, one which was oriented toward fulfilling the individual needs of children. But this new, "child-centered" family came at the cost of the inheritance rights of the widow. Ultimately, the decline of the widow's power resulted from the deterioration of Dutch customs of community property under English common law and the concomitant growth of the commercially-oriented and individualistic society in the American colonies in the 18th century.

In the decades before the Revolutionary War, New York City testators resembled those from other colonies in how they increasingly narrowed their family responsibilities. In the 1600s, the distribution of bequests as well as the appointment of executors and guardians in the wills of Dutch New Yorkers reflected the strength of the kinship ties and ethnic loyalties. By the mid-1700s economic and occupational ties played a more significant role in thes determinations. Over time ethnic divisions had become less salient. As Narrett notes, "[w]hile New York remained a pluralistic society, its people came to share a common culture that fostered male control of property within marriage, individual advancement by the young, and the economic self-sufficiency of famil households." (214)

All in all, Narrett is perhaps too reticent in his speculations about the large social and cultural meaning of the shift from marriage-centered to child-centered forms of testamentary practice in Dutch New York. This criticism notwithstanding, this book provides a wealth of insight into the gendered patterns of inheritance in one of the American colonies, and is an important contribution to the history of the family in early America.

Ed Hatton Temple University