The European marriage pattern as solution and problem: households of the elderly in Verviers, Belgium, 1831.

"The essay considers the effects of marriage patterns on the support of the elderly with empirical evidence from Verviers, a small industrial city in nineteenth-century Belgium. The (Northwest) European Marriage Pattern offered a solution for those elderly who had children, especially those with large families, because coresidence with children was the main source of support. The larger community experienced a problem...in the form of large numbers of persons who never married or reached old age with no surviving children. Moreover, while those who had married were able to maintain their economic status, those who never married liquidated their property holdings and became boarders and lodgers in the households of nonkin." excerpt