Vintage Royal Weddings: John Jay + Sarah Livingston

Jacobean Thimble 17th Century. Photo is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. The year is 1774. The month is May, and the New York Gazette posts a public announcement that a prominent attorney, Mr. John Jay, has married "the beautiful Sarah Livingston," at her parents' New Jersey estate {1}. The Livingstons and the Jays are two of only a handful of founding families in America. Predating the American Revolution, these families remain as true to their core values, those of culture and refinement, integrity and civic duty, good manners and respectability, as their forebears did in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their names are a legacy, and their descendants carry on lives that are, although private, extremely notable. They often shun the limelight, though their deaths usually spark a flurry of press attention. Far from being celebrities, these are the American aristocrats, American Royalty. Often moneyed, always influential, these families have shaped America in a subtle, yet profound way. In a slight nod toward European royalty, their marriages were quite often made for alliances rather than for love. Although, unlike their royal counterparts, they wisely chose not to keep it in the family. According to Stephen Birmingham, author of America's Secret Aristocracy, the discreet marriage announcement, made almost a month after the wedding took place, was perfectly appropriate, despite the underpinnings of royalty associated with such a delicious merger between "two linchpin American families" {2}. These two families had lived on American soil as colonizers for nearly 100 years by this time. Even the most private family affair included 300 Livingstons, perhaps as many Jays, and then all their close family friends, easily 1000 wedding guests. In lieu of wedding or engagement rings, it was customary for Colonial Americans to receive or exchange thimbles. Rings were eschewed by their Puritan ancestors, being that they were all too showy and altogether impractical. The practice of exchanging thimbles extended well into the 19th century, though by that time young women were said to remove the top portion of the thimble and wear the rim as a ring. Not so with Sarah Livingston. In all likelihood, she received a thimble and probably used it, too.

Notes

1. Birmingham, Stephen. America's Secret Aristocracy. Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1987, p. 17.
2. Ibid, p. 16.