https://longeviquest.com/2025/02/why-age-claims-require-validation/

Why Age Claims Require Validation

Several researchers have reached out to me following a recently updated pre-print by Newman (2024) where it was proposed that supercentenarians display patterns that indicate age fraud. The researcher performed a thorough analysis of plenty of surrounding factors but failed to perform the actual research necessary to validate the ages of the supercentenarians that were included in the registers that were utilized. It must also be noted that the archives utilized by the researcher are from 2017 and several updates have been made since then (especially following the start of LongeviQuest) as new findings have emerged that cast doubt upon several previously validated supercentenarians.

For example, in 2017 both Matthew Beard and Lucy Hannah were recognized by predecessor organizations as legitimate supercentenarians. I submitted research indicating that these claims were probably inaccurate around this time and when LongeviQuest started, both of these cases (along with several others) were quickly updated to reflect recent advances in age validation. I have posted several editorials on the matter of age validation previously and am a firm believer that it is necessary to actually find out how old alleged supercentenarians actually are and thus to weed out the false claims.

It must be acknowledged that age validation becomes increasingly feasible for many areas around the world every day. An increasing amount of supercentenarians (especially in the US) have birth records now than compared to the past. Supercentenarians from some countries have always possessed birth documentation. This is especially the case for Europe where every genuine supercentenarian born in England, France, Spain, Germany, the Nordic countries (Lindberg, 2024) etc. possess documentation from the time of their birth.

For the US the situation is a bit different as most (but far from all) supercentenarians in the United States have been validated using the US census records (which have been enumerated once every decade since the 1700s) or state census records that were taken in a few states. No validated US supercentenarian has their earliest record supporting their claimed age dated after their 20th birthday. And yes, it is an issue that the 1890 US census was mostly destroyed in a fire as there was a large number of supercentenarians born in the 1880s that therefore had to be validated using the 1900 census. Does it lower the likelihood that these people were actually supercentenarians? Not that much, really. There’s usually very little incentive for age exaggeration at a young age other than for marrying or serving in the military and only a few of these supercentenarians married near the minimum age of 18.

The most notable age claim validated with a document dated from when the person was around 20 is, perhaps, Maggie Barnes who claimed a birth in March 1880 but isn’t listed in the 1880 census. Her marriage record from 1899 suggests that she was 19 years old at the time and the 1900 US census says that she was born in March 1881. Subsequent records indicate a birth year ranging from 1880 to 1882. She’s been recognized as born in 1882 as this was what Barnes herself claimed until around the time of death of Jeanne Calment. A March 1880 birth would have made Barnes older than both Marie-Louise Meilleur and Sarah Knauss, which would have made her Calment’s successor as world’s oldest person. Speaking of Sarah Knauss, for a long time she too was an example of a person born in the 1880s validated using the 1900 census as she lacks a known birth record. I discovered her in some church records several years back, but these didn’t provide an age. Luckily, a copy of the 1890 census was taken for the area in which she lived at the time, and the census record confirmed that Knauss didn’t exaggerate her age for marriage.

For Japan, the situation is different still. We’ve seen examples of inaccurate validations in the past, such as Kamato Hongo or Sogen Kato (to be extreme). The Koseki records and other similar documents are used to validate the ages of Japanese supercentenarians and these records were sometimes also lacking in the past. For instance, there is a debate on whether Nabi Tajima was born in 1900 or 1901 as there are different sources supporting each of these years . Personally, I prefer being conservative when validating the age of a supercentenarian as it “feels” better to upgrade than to downgrade validations. Furthermore, the MHLW in Japan has great awareness of the ages of Japanese supercentenarians with exceedingly few gaps in the records.

Other places still see many dubious claims of extreme longevity. I’ve been contacted a few times about someone’s grandparent in a country with less reliablie record-keeping being 120 years old or even older. I’m sure that the grandparent is very old, but they certainly aren’t 120 years old. Sadly, even if they were, there often would be no way of proving this given the lack of records in certain areas. This is why we need age validation.

An increasingly low number of supercentenarian claims turn out to be inaccurate, especially when it comes to countries where there is a long-standing tradition of record-keeping. While I am aware of a few exaggerated age claims from the US over the past years, these are in the extreme minority. A few decades ago it was an entirely different story as there plenty of exaggerated claims gaining attention but this is simply not the case any longer. Exaggerations such as those by Bernando LaPallo or “Dishpan Grammie” Ellen Swank (or even the alleged Civil War veterans) are likely relics of a bygone era.

But if most supercentenarian claims are accurate nowadays, do we even need age validation? Yes! Returning to what I said earlier, there are still a few bad oats in the grain that need to be removed to guarantee a robust dataset that we can utilize for various purposes (such as what we did in a paper by Jeffrey Xu and me from last year, where we looked at patterns in survival and seasonality among others (Lindberg & Xu, 2024). And if you are travelling far to interview someone celebrating their 113th birthday, you probably want to be sure that they actually are as old as they claim to be… The same goes if you venture into biosampling. What do you gain from analyzing the saliva of a person claiming to be 115 years old when they, in fact, only are 97 years old? It’s important to first validate the age of the person rather than conducting research in vain.

Age validation is something that everyone can partake in as it isn’t that difficult to do genealogical research and to come to the conclusion that if person X is listed as being five years old in 1880, then they were probably born in 1874/75. Of course, then there’s also the matter of ascertaining that the person that is identified in a given record is the same person as the one claiming to be 110+ years old and for this, a more trained eye might be necessary. Otherwise we’ll end up with validations in which an incorrect census listing is attributed to the wrong person, such as with Lucy Hannah.

To conclude
There is little basis to claim that age validation of supercentenarians is an inaccurate endeavor and that most supercentenarians aren’t the age claimed. Validated supercentenarians need to have documentation with a high degree of accuracy and high standards for age validation must be maintained. One can always argue about how person Y is probably not as old as they claim, but when the early-life evidence points to them being 110+ years old, there needs to be something substantial disputing said evidence to cast serious doubt on the claim.