I’ve spent a lot of time on ancestrydotcom these last 5 years or so. The number of women who died in childbirth is staggering. And depressing. In one case, I found a three-generation string. That was early 1600s in the Jamestown area.
Until late 1800ths, women lived on average substantially shorter than men, because of complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
My Dodson line came over with Smith to Jamestown.
Be careful believing Ancestry. Use it as breadcrumbs.
I've done a good bit of digging around on that and other genealogy sites too. There are a few things that strike you immediately. The number of women who died in childbirth. The number of little babies who died in the first year (and to a lesser extent kids under the age of 10) and finally just how many kids they had. Holy Crap! They were cranking out a good 8-9 kids who lived per generation. Once you see that you come to quickly understand how so few people in the 1600s could turn into so many by the 20th century.
Definitely. One of my (local) great-great-grandfathers was married three times, my gggmother being his third wife. The second wife only lasted a couple of years (probably not even) so, of the rather large number of kids, there were three groups.
OTOH, in the south, where tobacco was the big crop early on, the men tended to be croaking out more due to labor in the very sunny and hot fields, while the widows would have little trouble finding another husband who needed land to earn his fortune. George Washington was in that boat. Martha it sez here spent about half of the Revolutionary War with George, what a trooper.