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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: melba_schmelba on Monday 05 February 18 11:48 GMT (UK)
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Has anyone else had a provable case where a person once they got to 70 steadily increased their age, perhaps hoping to reach 100 sooner ::) ;)?
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My mum remembers one of her great grandmothers claiming to be 95.
The death certificate from a couple of years later shows, correctly, that she died aged 86. Unfortunately cause of death was Senility, so we are not sure if the claim was intentional. :(
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I had an old great aunty who died in late 2007. She was born in 1913 and just before she died she said she was 100. She was in hospital at the time. Her details were at the bottom of the bed and I looked just to be doubly sure she was born in 1913 and it did say born 13 Oct 1913. She was 94.
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Jane Johns was born on 18th February 1845 in Appledore Devon. Her age was recorded correctly in the next five censuses up to 1891. In 1901 a year had been added and by 1911, three years added being shown as 69.
In 1936 she was reported in the newspapers as 94 (3 years added) in telling the story of how she had worked for the same family for 76 years.
According to a newspaper report on the day of her death (she died the day before her birthday in 1940) she had actually taken off 2 years from her age for the earlier newspaper article saying she was actually 96 not 94. The care home where she lived were thus preparing to celebrate her100th birthday when she passed away on the eve of the event at 99 years of age (5 years added).
This obviously caused some consternation and suddenly somebody recalled that at some time in the past Miss Jones had associated her starting at work at 16 with the birth of one of the Doctors that she would eventually work with and that she had already passed her 100th birthday in 1939. Thus Jane Johns Death was recorded in Central Devon, age 100 fully 6 years older than the 94 that she was. The vicar at Appledore couldn’t find her baptism (he should have looked in 1845) and was happy to report that this would be the first centenarian to be buried in his church yard. Everyone wanted her to be 100 :). No one could understand why she had not received her telegram from the King in 1939, I suspect because she had reported her age correctly when she had to register for her pension.
Simon
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This made me smile and certainly my maternal grandmother who registered the death of her mother and gave the stone mason the information for her mothers grave stone documented her mother 15yrs old then she was however I was never sure if it was what she thought or was told as none of my great grandmothers records matched up and I couldn't find a birth or baptism when I began researching...once more experienced I 'sussed' it out, it seems she lied her whole life marrying a man much older than her so 'adjusted' her age on the marriage cert and all and any census so took it that it 'looked better' in her eyes.
Both sets of grandparents were older parents, well into their late 30s, one set who was married for 18yrs before my dad and only child was born and the others married in their mid 30s and had my mother in their late 30s... then my mother, I and my daughter changed that and had our children aged 18/19yrs old...
What makes me smile is my mother knocks off years of her own age and has done for the past 20 yrs.soon she will be younger than me ;D
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I had a relative who consistently claimed to be younger then she was, despite others knowing her real age ... until she reached 80, and from that point she consistently claimed to be older than she was! There was a fair jump in her age that year!
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Every time I read about any centenarian in days gone past I always check their death entry, then try to find their birth .... just to check.
I had one in my distant tree that did that and was lying! There's even a photographic postcard of him that was taken/sold at the time due to his waxing lyrical about his age.
Right, just looked it up. It was a chap called Isaac Morgan.
Baptised 1820 https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2ZH-SB14
Two older siblings baptised in 1813 and 1815.
1841 Census, aged 20-24.
1871 Census, aged 51. Written by his older brother, with whom he was lodging.
1881 Census, aged 58.
1891 Census, aged 71.
1901 Census, aged 81.
1911 Census, aged 103.
1911 Newspapers: Declaring himself 103 at Chapel le Frith Workhouse in March 1911
1912 Died at an alleged 104 in Derbyshire, reported in Derbyshire Times on 3 February 1912.
FreeBMD has him down as 104.
I figure he can't have been baptised once older than an infant because the family were settled and two older brothers had already been dragged into the church in 1813 and 1815, so the family had plenty of time to have dragged him in there sooner than the 1820 they did it.
I therefore suggest.... he died aged 92.
He clearly saw more and more centenarians getting a few free beers and visitors after 1901, so decided to oomph up his age some :)
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I had a relative who consistently claimed to be younger then she was, despite others knowing her real age
I had one like that until the 1891 census when she was getting on a bit and her younger sister must have completed the household schedule - she was suddenly 18 or so years older than the 1881 ;D
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My grandmother was the opposite and always claimed to be a couple of years younger than she actually was. It was only when she died and my uncle found her her birth certificate we discovered she was almost 99 and not 97 as she claimed. I wonder what would have happened if she'd lived another year, would she have suddenly admitted she was 100? I think the reason was that she was born a couple of months after her parent's marriage, so perhaps it had been covered up from an early age.
Slightly off topic but have you noticed how once people get past 80 they always feel the need to mention how old they are in conversation, so they say things such as "I'll be 85 next year" ? ;D ;D
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My 3xG grandfather had a younger sister called Mary Gardner. She was baptised 19th September 1830. Census ages agree with a birth date close to her baptism ie
1841 11 years
1851 21 years
1861 31 years
1871 41 years
1881 51 years
1891 59 years
1901 67 years
1911 80 years
Then in 1927 a newspaper article celebrates her hundredth birthday, stating she was born 12th August 1827. She died a few years later on 16th August 1930, a newspaper article and burial record state her to be 103 years old.
I am convinced she gained those extra three years 'intentionally' :) Her older brother was baptised 20th April 1828, all her siblings were baptised about a month after birth.
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Wow, thanks for all the amazing replies :) :)! It seems a real mix of possible senility, and maybe hoping to reach that great milestone (much rarer back then than it is now), and adding a few years on ;D. Do we know when the letter from the Queen/King started? I have heard that is now going to stop as there are too many centenarians, perhaps they should change it to 110?!
My own example, I don't want to name in case I am unfairly besmirching him ::), but it is a similar story as mentioned in many posts here. He married at a fairly late age, and then was widowed about five years later, leaving him with two children, who I suspect were looked after by the wife's sisters. I think he moved to London to escape, and hid in as sombre place as you can imagine - in a road that runs through one of the newly built London grand cemeteries , where he was in 1841, aged 50 with two male servants, but I know 1841 ages aren't necessarily accurate. But 10 years later, he was still in the same place with one female servant, aged 60, correct birth place. But he then retired to the country, back to a village where his wife's family lived, but in 1861 he was now 77! That continues in 1871, aged 87, and in 1881, aged 97, but intriguely now says parish unknown, so had people tried to find his baptism, not been able to, and he now changed his story?! Or it could be senility? There is definitely a gap between his siblings when he says he was born of 5 years, which is otherwise unexplained, but his mother does seem to have died in 1790 so could she have died in childbirth and the father forgot or was too distraught to get him baptised?
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I don't think it was always an intentional ploy to become 100 before you really were.
Remember before 1837 nobody had, or indeed needed, a 'birth certificate'. I think many people just were somewhat hazy about the actual number of the year they were born. It may have been 'the year of the great storm', or 'the year of the fiery comet'! and as the years went by, that year became a moveable feast. Their parents may have moved around a lot for work, and had many children, and remembering an exact date for them all, to tell them as they got older, became more and more difficult.
You were lucky if you could read and write, and even luckier if you had a family bible in which to record all the dates as they happened.
We are so used to filling in our birthdates now, I think we forget things were very different in the past. :)
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In the case of my Mary Gardner I don't think senility/ forgetfulness was the case. In the 1901 & 1911 census she was living with her daughter; she was apparently very active (for her age) and alert until about ten days before she died. I am fairly sure she, or her family, fancied being in the newspaper 😁
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My grandmother did it but I think it was due to her dementia - every time she slept she seemed to think it was a new day - so for her having had several naps she would have been getting on - to the point where the staff at nursing home she was in after breaking her neck rang my aunt to check her date of birth because she kept telling them she was 90 (I think she was 83 at the time - died when she was 85)
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My Great x3-Grandmother Jane Gabriel shows in the 1851 Census in Ruabon Denbighshire as born in Llangwm Meirionethshire in 1765.Her death in 1859 in the Rhosymedre Parish Registers shows her as 100 years old.
Regards
William Russell Jones.
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Further back in time (1600s and 1700s), I'm always sceptical of extreme old age noted in parish registers. I think in an age where most people were illiterate and innumerate, and when there were no bureaucratic reasons to recall your date of birth, it would be much easier to lose track of age.
I imagine some elderly people estimated their age based on other dates - a monarch's death for example, or born a certain number of years after a sibling. Of course if family members were the ones estimating an elderly/deceased relative's age, that creates further opportunity for inaccuracy.
I want to find out whether my 102-year-old ancestor who died in 1820 was really 102.
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I don't think it was always an intentional ploy to become 100 before you really were.
Remember before 1837 nobody had, or indeed needed, a 'birth certificate'. I think many people just were somewhat hazy about the actual number of the year they were born. It may have been 'the year of the great storm', or 'the year of the fiery comet'! and as the years went by, that year became a moveable feast. Their parents may have moved around a lot for work, and had many children, and remembering an exact date for them all, to tell them as they got older, became more and more difficult.
You were lucky if you could read and write, and even luckier if you had a family bible in which to record all the dates as they happened.
We are so used to filling in our birthdates now, I think we forget things were very different in the past. :)
Yes I think that's a good point. Most people were far too poor, stressed and probably ill to worry about birthdays! Probably when the census came in that might have been the first thing that actually encouraged people to learn when exactly they had been born, and where.
In my ancestor's case, I think it may have been true. What I didn't consider is that a lonely widower in his 40s and 50s may well for vanity's sake reduce his age by 5 or so years, even if it was just to impress the housekeeper! But then the pendulum switches later when great age might be seen as a quality worth having :).
I actually went back to newspaper reports of his death and they do say his age was authenticated. He still had a brother who lived in the same town of his birth who was of some repute so it seems a bit of a stretch he would dare fibbing about it. It is just a bit of a mystery why his, and only his baptism is missing out of his siblings. It did occur to me someone may have cut it out of the register as proof, but I can't see any such damage on the registers on findmypast.
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After my Dad turned 95, he started telling people he was "nearly 100"
And he made it there, dying aged 101 and 4 months.
And, thankfully, with all his marbles :P :P :P
He wasn't very impressed with the scrappy little card signed by the Gov-General, on this 100th, saying 'Her Majesty the Queen asked me to wish you happy 100th Birthday' [something along those lines anyway]. It certainly wasn't signed by the Queen! And the GG didn't identify who he was - only clue was that it had a Govt House crest on it :( :(
The letter from the Prime Minister was much more 'presentable'.
Dawn M
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My g.gran's age was correct on the 1851 & 1861 in 1871 married to her first husband she took 3 years off her age and said she was 25, as her husband was 18 years older than her and was aged 40 at the time of their marriage (it's just this minute struck me that he might have been married previously, although the marriage cert states he was a bachelor), he died sometime around 1876/77 and on the 1881 census she stated she was 32, when in fact she was 38.
I guess she must have met my g.grandfather by then, he was 15 years younger than her, and she stayed younger than her real age on all the census up to her death. My g.grandfather was the informant on her death cert - and guess what he gave her real age, so she hadn't fooled him. It would have been difficult of him to believe the age she gave, as he obviously knew her adult children from her first marriage and would have had to have been a child bride at the time of her first marriage if the age she gave was correct.
Interestingly, to keep up the pretence of being younger than she was on the 1911 census, her widowed sister who was 5 years younger than her, also had her age doctored on that census, even though on all others she had given her real age.
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In Feb 1842, my ancestor Elizabeth Packard (Nee Martin) was aged 102 when she died. I have not found her baptism yet and Martin is a fairly common name in Suffolk. Would be nice to get proper proof of her age so that the 102 year old claim is right.
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All this reminds me of my Mum, who always looked very youthful and customarily told people she was a lot younger than she was.
However, she mentioned that this had caught up with her one day, when she was telling a group of acquaintances of the achievements of me and my brother and realised that our ages didn't support her previous assertions.
She told me that she had to quickly adjust and tell them that she'd had to get married at 15 in order to make it all work..... ;)
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;D ;D ;D ;D
One of my great aunts used to add a few years on to her age when in her 80s, while her (younger) sister took off about 5 years from hers.
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Mother in law was surprised (by official communication) to hear her Aunt was approaching 100 as she was only admitting to 90.
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Mother in law was surprised (by official communication) to hear her Aunt was approaching 100 as she was only admitting to 90.
My late mother around her 99th birthday, gave me strict instructions ( I was then a mere boy of 62!!) that if I received communication about her receiving a telegram from the Queen I was to say no, and to tell her (Mum) that I had done so. Alas she died at 99 years 3 months.