I seems to me that knowing your grandparents into your adult years mst be fairly new. In the late 1800’s, people died (usually) in their 50’s-so would a 20 year old grow p knowing his/her grandparents?
Or did most people live in multi-generational households-so there would be at least one grandparent arounds, at any given time?
Old age must have been only for the toughest, fittest people-what with all the bacterial diseases around.
But, if you made it into your 50’s (in the 1800’s) did you stand a pretty good chance of reaching, say 80?
This really isn’t true. Yes the average age is lower, but a lot of that has to do with dieing in childhood and such. Once you made it into your 20s and 30s you stood a good chance of living into your 60s and 70s.
I just ran a descendant report on one of my ancestors who was born in 1800 and died in 1883. He lived long enough to have great grandchildren. I’ve seen enough obituaries that list people having 10-20 great grandchildren. People started having children in their late teens and early 20s.
I think it might be the opposite today, I only knew three of my grand parents, and one only a little bit. With people having children later in life I would not be surprised if I didn’t have grand kids until I was in my 60s and I probably will not see great grandchildren.
I don’t know about that. I’ve got my geneology done back to the 18th century for all four branches (tracked each grandparent back to the Old Countries). There are very few who died in their 50s. Most lived to at least their late 60s - 80s. The ancestor who left Scotland and came to this country did so before the U.S. was a country. It appears he fought in the Revolutionary war. The only marriage I have a record for, for him, happened when he was 38 (in 1779). He went on to father 10 children and died at something like 89. Most of his children lived into their 70s and 80s. This is about 100 years prior to the era you are referring to.
I could probably go through the whole family tree and collect data for life lengths and come up with a real number, percentage-wise. But I think I’d like to ask where you got the data that people only lived into their 50s in the late 1800s?
Also people had kids earlier in life. And multiple marriages were more common as when a husband or wife died the spouse remarried quicker
Why does no one understand how life expectancy works?
Anyway, on my mom’s side they tend to live to ripe old ages unless they drink themselves to death so it’s nothing very new. My grandfather just died at 98 (though it would have been earlier without modern medical treatment) and his parents and grandparents both made it to their mid-80s at least. His mother, my great-grandmother, died a few days before I was born - her youngest grandchild was 24.
I own an actual documented history of my grandmother’s family dating back to the 1300s in Germany. There is a strong pattern of marriage, childbirth, childbirth, death of child, death in childbirth, death of child, second marriage, lather-rinse-repeat. Eventually the last wife survives and apparently lives to a reasonable age as do a couple of children. People who survived to adulthood often would have had at least one grandparent or step-grandparent. This was a working-class family, full of shopkeepers and chemists, so was probably fairly typical of a non-aristrocratic group.
As Rhubarbarin said, if you averaged all the ages at death, you’d come up with a low number but that doesn’t mean there weren’t old people around.
When my children were born, they had 5 living great great grandparents (all 95+). All five have passed in the last 10 years, however. (The youngest birth in any generation was 23 years old so no cheating with teenage babies.) But they spent last Christmas with one set of Great Grandparents (of the 8 possiblilities, 6 were alive at their births and 4 are still today) playing in the surf in Hawaii. So I totally agree that there seems to be a much longer relationship possible today due to length but also old people are much more active and healthy today.
I remember some of my great-grandparents but they just sat in their rockers. Having a meaningful memory of great grandparents didn’t happen, let alone great greats like today.
I think this is key. It’s perfectly reasonable to remember your great grandmother if your average length of generation is only 18 years; given that spacing, a person’s child is born at 18, their first grandchild at age 36, and their first great-grandchild at age 54. That works ideally only for the first kid in each generation, but it shows the principle. Today’s longer generations greatly outweigh the advances of medical science.
I think this is more the case nowadays. Now that it is considered normal among the educated in society to delay childbearing until mid 30s-early 40s, I suspect a lot more families will end up with few or no grandparents.
My parents had kids relatively late in life. I only met one of my grandparents (though Gram was a very good grandparent to have). All the others died before I was ever born.
Unfortunately both of my parents died on the young side and I’m having kids on the old side, so my kids will only meet 50% of their grandparents at best.
I fully expect my MIL/FIL to live to see their older grandchildren – the ones in college right now – marry and possibly have children. They’re both in their early 70s and still going strong.
Unfortunately my lineage tends to be short-lived. Everyone on my dad’s side who didn’t die prematurely (like my dad) lived to roughly around 70. My mother was the longest-lived on her side. She was 84 when she passed. All her brothers passed when they were in their 60s to early 70s.
I never knew either of my grandfathers. Both my grandmothers passed when I was very young. I barely remember either of them.
Who wants some stats then that come from my genealogical databases.
The first database is mine, most of the information should be pretty good since I’ve done the research myself.
I have 355 people with a death age. The average is 65.79, for men it’s 63.84, for women 67.92
The next database is also one I’ve been working on so it should be good. For 225 people, average 62.57, men 61.72, women 64.50.
The next file is mine, but has a lot of problems with it, still it should be good. 5693 people with ages, average 58.18, men 57.45, women 59.52.
Not my file, but a professional genealogists. 59,180 people, average 59.27, men 58.33, women 60.89.
That includes all the people who died at the age of 0 so people have always lived a longer time if you make it to adulthood. I would say that many people knew, or at least could have known, a great great grandparent.
Between 1700 and 1989, my paternal ancestors’ recorded AoD and CoDs were:
- 1 aged 33; illness (a doctor caught in an epidemic); 1898
- 4 between ages 20 and 45; sudden lead poisoning (aka civil wars). Last known case in 1938. All males.
- 17 age 65, cancer. All of them male.
- over 30 age above 80, old age. Every woman and some of the men.
The stats are holding, for the last 30 years. Dad died of cancer at 62, but his elder brother did it at 68, so they average to the old value.
On my maternal side, we have five living generations living right now. This was helped along by the fact that my grandmother and great-grandmother got married in their early teens (15 and 13, IIRC). My great-grandmother lived to be 98. My grandmother (who is now a great-great grandmother) is currently 85. So they got married early and died late.
What’s interesting is that today, even though we have five generations alive, the youngest will never “know” the oldest because we live in different states. Prior generations rarely ventured beyond a few miles of their home, but the advent of the automobile has made us all much more mobile – and much less connected to our families.
Theodore Von Karman (the famous aeronautical engineer) had a theory that 150 years was the span of human ideologies-his reasoning was that you would get ideas from your grand parents, and you would know things theat they knew-and pass these on to your children.
By this reasoning, nationalism (in european politics) which came in around 1800, would start to die out around 1950.
It is interesting that if you know your grandparents as an adult, you have a connection with the past which is pretty real-my grandfather (who died in 1977), would describe events to me, from before WWI.
He was pretty accurate.
I recall a mortality table somewhere that the life expectancy of a 50-year old in 1900 was about seven to nine years lower than today.
I was born in 1969. Both my grandfathers, as it happens, died before I was born. This was unusual among my friends.
My maternal grandmother died when I was 18, leaving me, at the start of adulthod, with one living grandparent. Most of my same-age friends still had two, three, or four living grandparents at that age (some with step-grandparents as well).
My mother, born in 1933, still had one living grandmother when she herself became a grandmother with the birth of my brother’s first son in 1983. We have a photo of the five generations together. Our local newspaper published five-generation photos, but not four-generation photos as this was too common.
I don’t think this is a new thing, is what I’m saying.