AT THE BEGINNING OF MARRIED LIFE
More than two-thirds (68.5 per cent) of the petitioners were married at the time of their petition for naturalization. One may hazard the guess that the majority were either unmarried or newly married when they came to this country, because, while 89.9 per cent of the 18,017 married petitioners reported wives of foreign birth, 10,563 (73.5 per cent) of them had children exclusively native-born. Only one in ten had foreign-born children only, and only 16.5 per cent had both native and foreign-born children. And 14,371 (79.8 per cent) of the married petitioners had one or more children under 21 years of age.[118]