The Last Surviving...

Factual Questions
1

Simon Wiesenthal’s death earlier today had me thinking… I once saw a list in a newspaper that calculated different variables such as life expectancy, number of people involved, etc., and came up with approximate years by which it estimated there would be no more surviving members of significant historical events. In the near future, we’re going to start reaching some of those dates. Already, WWII veterans and Holocaust survivors are declining rapidly, though it will be a while yet before we’ve seen the last of them: there are, after all, still a handful of WWI veterans out there. The last veteran of the American Civil War didn’t die till the mid-1950s! (He was, as I recall, a child who had lied about his age to join up.) For that matter, the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire didn’t die till a year or two ago.

So when do you think we’ll see the “last of” various groups? How long can we reasonably estimate till there’s no one left alive who remembers Nazi Germany? The Korean War? Woodstock? Vietnam? For that matter, what do you think is the oldest world event still barely in living memory? WWI? The Russian Revolution? Is it possible anyone remembers anything before that? The Boer War?

2

Over here, one of the last surviving soldiers from The Great War died a few days ago, aged 105 or 106. I cannot lay my hands on the article, but I remember reading that he saw active service as a 17-year old. It seems there are still about 5 or 6 others still alive.

3

If we assume nobody makes it to age 110 and nobody really remembers anything much before age 5 (especially about events that didn’t touch their then-simple toddler/infant life), then living memory will never extend more than 105 years into the past.

So as of now, the year 1900 is fading from living memory. Next year it’ll be 1901, etc. It’s a smooth, predicatable, and inexorable process, like watching stuff fall off the end of a conveyor belt.

And that’s pretty much the upper lmiit given human lifespans so far.

Now that’s simply talking about people who were alive at the time something happened, i.e. the difference between being a WW-I combat vet and being a person with memories of being alive as a toddler on Armistice Day in 1918. The former memory is as a participant, the latter as a spectator.

In any major event, participants other than victims mostly need to be a near-adult or older to play. So pull about 10 years off my estimate to account for participants generally being 15 or older, and now we see first-party participant memory of 1915 receding into the grave. And as we go forward, that effect gets stronger at least in the First World. There were a relatively a lot of US child soldiers in the Civil war, less in WW-I, and none by Viet Nam. Non-participatory childhood just gets longer every year.

Obviously that age 15 limit doesn’t extend to victims. One can remember being bombed in a war (or flooded in a hurricane!) from age 5 or so, and that age is not going to change much going forward.
You said “… we’re going to start reaching some of those dates.” Wrong.

We’ve been reaching those dates every day for the last 400 centuries and will continue reaching those dates every day going forward for the imaginable future. There were plenty of significant events that took place in the 1700s that dropped off living memory before you were born.

What you meant was “pretty soon we’re going to start reaching those dates for events that I read about or heard about during my life. In other words, events significant to my little time-slice of human history.”

As students we learn a lot about the 50 years before our birth. Earlier than that the coverage tapers off rapidly, at least in the US school system. So sure enough, about the time we reach middle age the folks 50 years older than us start dying off and taking the memory of the stuff we learned about in school with them.

4

No, read the OP carefully.

He says that he once read a newspaper article estimating various future dates. Then he says that some of the dates listed in the newspaper are in the near future, that we shall soon arrive at the first date or first event in the article.

5

There is still a handful of Titanic and Lusitania survivors. And maybe a couple of other “survivors” (who were still inside the tummy) who might be around a few more years.

6

The US signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783 which ended the Revoluntionary War.

In 1883, Congress had printed a list showing all military pensioners as of that date. About half a dozen widows were then receiving benefits, because their
husbands had served in that war.

7

And, of course, the ever-popular “last surviving Civil/First World War widow”: generally a (then) pre-teen “married” to a much older vet so as to provide dowry via pension. The former has petered out for obvious reasons but I suspect there’s still a few of the latter.

It’s similiar to the number of Princess Anastasias that have popped up throughout the 20th century. Too bad they found her remains and now know that it was a different daughter who went missing, though I suspect it’s too late to jump on that bandwagon.

8

Yeah, it may or may not be clear based on my original post, but I thought it was fairly obvious that I’m talking about primarily 20th century events. Obviously there’s no one left who remembers the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the American Civil War, or anything in the 400 centuries before that. That’s a given. But it is interesting to think of what is passing out of historical memory in our lifetime. The 105-year rubric sounds pretty solid. And I guess you can stretch that quite a bit if you include people who knew the participants pretty well (ie, the “oldest Confederate widow” type thing), even after the fact. That might seem to be stretching things to the point of irrelevance, but on the other hand, it’s interesting to think that there still might be people alive today who were the children of American slaves. There almost certainly are people alive who knew ex-slaves (those WPA guys in the 30s, for example). If I remember correctly, Larry King once said in an interview that the nurse he had as a child could remember hearing the Gettysburg Address!

This might all sound rather obsessive and meaningless to some people, but I think it does a lot to personalize history, and to drive home just how relatively recent a lot of “ancient” history really is.

9

In the late 1950s, on “I’ve Got a Secret” a contestant appeared who was (so we were told) the last known witness of the Lincoln assassination.

10

Coincidentally, over the weekend the Independent carried an obituary (free access will lapse within the next day) for George Rice, one of the few remaining British WWI veterans, who died on the 17th aged 108. Having served in the TA and worked in munitions, he was called up towards the end of 1917 and saw action on the Western Front through most of 1918.

The obituary states that his death now leaves only 8 known British WWI veterans. It’s written by Max Arthur, who has a book in the works on the subject that’s mentioned in this article from last year. Together with the numbers in it, it looks as if we’ve reached the stage where about half of the British veterans are dying each year.

11

I just wanted to provide the quick links for the OP:
I think many know of neither. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was actually one of the most important events in American History and wasn’t mentioned in my HS classes. I only found out about it later via PBS.

12

Just a minor input, but I remember an aphorism by a famous science fiction writer (I think it was Arthur C. Clarke, but I’m not entirely sure) who said that the day when there will be no human being left who had been on the moon would be a sad day for mankind.

Of course the probability or time frame of this happening could change, considering recent NASA announcements.

13

I remember reading about the 1997 death of Jeanne Calment and thinking "She has to be the last surviving person who actually knew Van Gogh.

14

I learned about it as a child from a made-for-TV movie The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal.

One of my most cherished stories I ever wrote as a reporter was an interview with a 92-year-old veteran of World War I. (This was c. 1986; he is certainly deceased by now.)

The poor man was living in poverty, in a terrible trailer in an extremely poverty-stricken small town. He could barely hear, and most of my questions had to be written down. I’ll never forget the memory of him reciting a poem, in German, he learned while serving in Germany after the Armistice. He was an eduated man; it was very sad seeing him living in such circumstances. Yet he was very gracious to me. It was an honor meeting him.

15

It was definitely mentioned in my high school and junior high school as a major event and I went to crappy Los Angeles public schools. It was in my textbooks and the teachers spent at least an entire day on it.

16

When my father was a young boy, an old man offered his hand, so he could ‘shake the hand that shook the hand of Abraham Lincoln’.

17

According to Wikipedia, there are about 60 surviving WWI veterans.

Considering that about 30 died this year alone and that about 40 died in 2004, I’d say that they’ll all be gone in a few years. Of course, then there are still those who were either non-combatants or too young to be in combat but to still remember the war. I’d say about another twenty to twenty five years before there is no one born before 1914 alive.

Of course, we now have audio and visual recording to make bringing the past to life a bit easier than they did in my grandfather’s day.

Zev Steinhardt

18

That sounds really cool to me. As silly as it probably sounds to some people. Do Presidents these days do mass handshakings anymore?

19

I remember seeing a news report a couple years back concerning the death of a woman in Britain who was possibly the last person with living memory of Queen Victoria — as a small girl in 1900, her father held her up so she could see Victoria ride past in a parade. Playing ‘Six Degrees of Separation’, that would’ve made her within two degrees of Duke Wellington, who knew Victoria when she was a young woman.

20

Wow. It’s sobering to realize that they can not only say how many survivors there are, but they’ve got plenty of space to list all of them…

I was thinking the same thing when reading about the new Moon plans. Of the 24 men who flew to the Moon, 18 are still alive and they range in age from 69 to 77. Of the 12 who actually walked on the Moon, nine are still alive and they range from 69 to 75. If NASA makes their target date of 2018 the youngest Moon walker will be 82.

Those guys were excellent physical specimens, so I’d guess the odds are pretty good that some of them will still be alive to see the next Moon landing. At least, I really, really hope so…