"This paper is an attempt to find a procedure for estimating past trends in the rate of decline of adult mortality [using] data collected during a census or a single sample survey.  It indirectly focuses on trends in adult death rates by looking at proportions not-widowed by age-groups and changes in these proportions caused by diminishing death rates.  An equation has been developed which expresses the proportion not-widowed of the ever-married population in an age-group as a function of the current level of mortality in the population, a first marriage frequency distribution, and the past rate of mortality decline."  The technique is applied to data from the 1974 Bangladesh Retrospective Survey of Fertility and Mortality.