Were Younger Brides Common in the Lika Province, Croatia?

One unusual part of family history is Mildred's age at the time that she and Andrew (Jandre) got married.  When they married in April 1924, Mildred was only only 14 but Andrew was 35.  

According to the 1930 Census, Mildred's mother - Sophie - also married when she was very young:

On this record, they have that Sophie married when she was 17.  However it also says that Joseph (her husband) married when he was 25, but there is a 12 year gap between the two, so one of those numbers must be wrong (or this is the second marriage for both of them).  If this is their first marriage, and Joseph's age was correct, then Sophia would have only been 13.   Either way Sophia was young when she got married (even 17 is too young for my daughters!).

One question for me is whether getting married young (and to someone much older) was a common practice in the Kurjak area.  I cannot answer when people got married, but we can use the records from the graveyards in the area to see the age gap of the couples.

In identifying couples I took the conservative approach of only using people who were explicitly identified as a married couple on their tombstone.  From the six graveyards we have taken pictures of, I was able to identify 108 couples.

Below is a histogram of the age gap where larger values indicate that the husband is older (Age Gap = Wife's birth year - Husband's birth year).  I have also marked Jandre-Mildred's age gap on the histogram too.

On average the men were older than their wives.  For the median couple, the husband was 3 years older than their wife.  Further, Jandre and Mildred were relative outliers (though not the couple with the largest gap - although I have my doubts about the largest gap).  Even the 12 year gap between Sophia and Joseph (Jovo) would have made them outliers too (in the top 5%).