Half-Blood: The Law, Inheritance, and Sibling Relationships in the Stepfamilies of Early New England

Biological, step, and half siblings underwent a kind of legal partitioning in the eighteenth century. A continuing debate over “half-blood” inheritance rights, as one example, demonstrated these new demarcations. The British courts wrangled over the issue of half-blood sibling inheriting the estate of a full-blood sibling in the seventeenth century, finally ruling in favor of half-blood children’s rights by the turn of the eighteenth century.  New Englanders, however, continued to debate the issue. Keeping real estate in a particular bloodline became an increasingly important topic as land became scarce in some parts of the longer-settled colonies of the region. As a young lawyer, John Adams noted in his legal diary of 1755 that since the law in question governed the distribution of intestate estates, it followed logically that a law governing such estates should reflect the desires of the deceased if they had not been “surprised by a sudden Death.” It seemed “natural” to Adams (not a member of a stepfamily himself), therefore, that both love and property would follow full-blood relationships.

"Now, Is not the natural Love of a Person to his Brothers and sisters of the whole   Blood,  greater than that to Brothers and sisters of the half Blood, and must we not suppose a Mans Inclinations would be to bestow his Estate upon his whole Brothers and sisters in Preference to his half Brothers and sisters? I appeal to Experience, whether Brothers and sisters of the half Blood, have half so strong an affection for each other as Brothers and sisters of the whole Blood. On the Contrary there are very often Grudges and Miffs and Misunderstandings between the second Crop of Children and the first."           

Despite Adams’s expectations, siblings of all kinds in the middle-class stepfamilies of eighteenth-century New England rarely made such fine-grained distinctions.