On the 16th of March in 1752, William Crookham and Mary Philips were married at the Swedes’ Church (Gloria Dei) in Southwark neighborhood, south of Philadelphia.
Photograph shows a bird’s-eye view of the Gloria Dei Church (Old Swedes’) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the cemetery in the foreground, with the masts of ships visible in the background.
Established near New Sweden, the Gloria Dei is the oldest church in Pennsylvania and the second oldest Swedish Church in the US. The congregation began to meet in the 1600s, and the building was consecrated in 1700. In the 1700s, it was a Swedish Lutheran church.
Philips is traditionally a Welsh name and several Welsh Quakers settled Pennsylvania. Additionally, in the years following her marriage, Quaker records from Monthly Meetings in the vicinity of Philadelphia lists Mary Crookham and her children, suggesting that Mary was a Quaker.
Crookham is an English Surname, and Crookham is not found in the Quaker records except when listed as the husband of Mary.
In the book “To be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary American, 1740-1790”, Gunderson writes about Quakers’ attitudes toward marriage in the mid 1750s.
Quaker’s Womens Meetings were used to select couples for marriage, ensuring parent consent and that the couple were in good standing.
If a women were to go outside of the Quaker religion to marry, they were often disowned; Gunderson writes “these were often women without enough standing to find a match in the limited Quaker marriage pool”.
By the time William and Mary wed, society had shifted in that the individuals often chose each other and sought consent from their parents and church afterward.
Many young people came to Gloria Dei Lutheran Church near Philadelphia to be married without their parents. While the minister would marry a woman over eighteen and a man over twenty-one who were free of indentures, he refused if the family had property.
To be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary American, 1740-1790, p 49-50
Claire Lyons writes in her book “Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830” that marriages at the Gloria Dei were thought to be lucky and so more marriages were preformed there than any other church in Philadelphia between 1789-1818.
Finding the Yellow Bricks 