Underage. This is a difficult problem because people became capable of assuming different kinds of responsibilities at different ages. We normally presume that you had to be 21 years old to practice law or serve on the county court (being a commissioner of the peace means being named in the commission of the peace means being appointed a justice of the peace), but there are documentable instances of persons 19 and 20 practicing law. There was NO legal minimum age for serving in the House of Burgesses until the 1690s (the assembly copied an act of Parliament that had just for the first time set a minimum age of 21), and the legal minimum age for serving on some kinds of juries, according to the Common Law, was 14. A great many approximate birth dates appear in old family histories and genealogies and notes to historic documents based on the assumption that a person was a certain age as of the time his or her name appeared in a certain kind of document. That's a very slippery kind of deduction. I recommend the chapters on age of consent in Holly Brewer's 1994 doctoral dissertation, "Constructing Consent: How Children's Status in Political Theory Shaped Public Policy in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts before and after the American Revolution." $0.02 worth from one who is certainly old enough, Brent Tarter The Library of Virginia [log in to unmask] Visit the Library of Virginia's web site at http://www.lva.lib.va.us To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html