Moderators: Global Moderators, Pandabean
Extremely well put!eilthireach wrote:"I don't think that they forgot their ages so much as they just lied about them."
Sorry, I'm not picking on the person who wrote this specifically, but it seems to be such a commonly held view that it just has to be refuted. It's nonsense. You have to understand the level of education (and competence in basic arithmetic!), the question whether the subject of date and place of birth was ever discussed between a child and its parents (or any individual and his/her parents) (and why should it discuss ages or places of birth with its parents ... why, my earliest memories were of such and such a village and so that must be where I was born, so I don't need to ask my parents for confirmation, and I remember playing with such and such children and I think we were all of the same age, which, I think, was X, and that was Y years ago, I think, and so I must be aged Z now), did the person have an occupation where age was of any concern whatsoever ... there are just so many variables that need to be borne in mind when reading records which give ages (parish registers, marriage records, census returns) ... did the individual know his/her own age, was it transmitted correctly to the person recording it, was it transmitted by that individual or by a second or third party, did the recorder hear correctly, was the information recorded there and then, or was it noted down and then transcribed later into the formal record, are there errors of transcription, .... there are just so many factors that have a bearing on this ... Remember also that the marking or celebration of birthdays - birthday parties and such things - are fairly recent things historically speaking, and social and cultural background determined whether birthdays were marked at all (even in modern times ... we didn't celebrate birthdays in our family, and for no other reason than we didn't, we just didn't! Noted them in passing, maybe, but no celebration!) ... remember also that especially before the introduction of civil registration there was as often as not (or probably more often than not) no record of your birth that you could refer to and ask for an official copy of ... not everyone was baptised, not even in the same family, as you may well have discovered in your researches
I read a book about emigration which cited a letter written by a German who had emigrated to the US in the 19th century. He was writing to his parents back home and asking them to write back and let him know how old he was!! (I don't know about you, but that got to me!)
... so, please, think flexibly when you are doing your researches ... bear all of these things in mind when you are reading the historical records ...
How else to explain why their ages became correct as they grew to old age, when your advanced age is now to your advantage, something to brag about.
sheilajim wrote:Hi All,
One of my GGGrandfathers gave his correct age on the earlier censuses, but when he took up with a much younger woman, he suddenly became nearly 20 years younger.
I have personal experience as well. I remember the scene when I was about 13. They came to register our family for an election. My eyebrows went up when I heard my father telling the registrar that he and my mother were in their mid thirties. My mother was 51 at the time, and my father 48. Now my father was well educated and certainly knew when he was born.
