I’ve started several similar threads up here,so I thought I might as well try to stir up another pointless discussion about an unlikely possibility.Anyway,I’m sure many of you know that the last widow of a Civil War veteran,Maudie Hopkins,died in 2008.My question is,is it possible,just slightly possible,that another Civil War widow still lives?Mrs.Hopkins was born in 1914 and married a Civil War veteran around 1933,when she was nineteen and he was eighty-six.So,let’s suppose that another woman was born in 1912,making her 100 now,and that she married an 84 year old veteran in 1934.This set of circumstances seems to me almost more likely than Hopkins’s,and hers was true.Of course,this is extremely unlikely-I realize that.It does,however,seem like a possibility,however low.
This is an unanswerable question unless the person in question decides to pop into the thread. In your thread about a living person who knew Robert Todd Lincoln, I gave the odds of that at nearly 100% which proved to be true. The chance of these circumstances is approaching 0%. You have to imagine this stuff like overlapping life graphs knowing what we know about human life expectancy plus the likelihood of any Civil War veteran that old marrying someone that young who also happened to have a extreme longevity and whose family hasn’t noticed the stories about the others and come forward.
It isn’t impossible but it is but close enough to satisfy me. Alberta Martin’s family (supposedly the last Civil War widow) was really surprised when another one, Maudie Hopkins, surfaced after her death to much embarrassment for people who value these kinds of things. That was 4 years ago though which is a tremedous amount of time in the longevity sweepstakes. The probability plummets every month that passes to the point where you can assume the probability is close enough to zero to stop looking.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maudie_Hopkins: A spokeswoman for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Martha Boltz, has said that there may be two other widows, one in Tennessee and another in North Carolina, but if they are still alive, they choose to remain in anonymity.
So there you have it: A definite maybe.
I wonder why the spokeswoman used the term “may be”?Anyway,even though it’s been some time since the spokeswoman made that claim,I think that definitely improves the chances of a Civil War widow still being alive.It doesn’t mean there is one,but it does mean there could be one.Very interesting.
The last verified Civil War vet died in 1956 at age 109. Let’s assume that shortly before his death, he married some 18-year-old bimbo. That woman would have been born in 1938, and would be 74 now. That’s the absolute limit for what would be possible.
It’s absolutely possible, but highly unlikely of course.
The reason that any remaining choose to remain in anonymity (if they exist) is probably a combo of their own great age and embarrassment over the marriage. The 20 year olds marrying 85 year olds weren’t usually love matches but pure mercenary arrangements: the girl, usually what would be termed “white trash” (because no respectable family would let their young daughter marry a man old enough to be her great grandfather) married the old man for his pension (which wasn’t much but would keep her in beans and cornbread for a month if she already had roof [a tesserae if you’ve read The Hunger Games) and the old man got a caregiver. It’s doubtful most of these marriages were even consummated- this was long before Viagra and these men had lived a very long and rough life, it’s doubtful they had the surge even if they had the urge.
Alberta Martin, for instance, was a penniless woman with an illegitimate baby when she married her ancient veteran. While married to him she had another baby but the father was her husband’s grandson, who she married a month after her husband died. There were exceptions, but many if not most people who entered into these arrangements were Maury Povich people before Maury Povich was born.
Jerry Lee Lewis married a 13-year-old - completely legally - in 1958, so you might want to revise your absolute limit by a few years.
It is true that a Civil War widow would have to be old,but a 109 year old marrying an 18 year old is taking it too far;the cases of Alberta Martin and Maudie Hopkins were far less extravagant than that,albeit still extremely unusual.Of course,as I said before I do not believe that there definitely are Civil War widows still alive,I’m just saying it’s possible,the same way it’s possible that we could go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow morning in some distant galaxy.It’s probable that no Civil War widows still remain,but I think it’s interesting to speculate.
That one actually is impossible based on what we know about the limits of travel based on the speed of light. My point is that it is possible to assign pretty accurate odds for questions like this or any other as long as you base those probabilities on other known facts like human lifespans, the number of Civil War soldiers who lived to be a very old…etc. A lot of people don’t understand this but it is a useful tool even in everyday life. Not every thing comes down to a YES/KNOW/Maybe. You can be much more exact with the ‘Maybe’s’ if you work through the correct set up assumptions so that it isn’t just a wild guess.
As far as the beginning of your post goes,the key words are"based on what we know about the limits of travel based on the speed of light,"because in reality,there are very few things that we know with *absolute * certainty;naturally,the chances that that will happen are still extremely low,but still there may be a 1 in 700 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion quadrillion chance that that could happen,so it is impossible for all intents and purposes,but it’s not literally impossible.Of course,this isn’t the subject of this thread,but the same rule applies to Civil War widows,in my opinion anyway.I admit,however,that the rest of your post is hard to argue with.
Because it has to be verified that the ladies’ husbands actually served in the Civil War. They might have married rich old men when they were in their teens or 20s, and maybe that old man liked to get drunk and tell about how he was Bobby Lee’s right hand man in the waning years of the war, but it’s probably not be true.
And I’m sure that interested parties have dug enough to realize that these stories aren’t true, or else we would have heard something.