Originally published under the title: “Age Makes a Difference”.
Genealogists typically pay close attention to the ages and birth dates of individuals. Often this data is used to determine whether or not a given individual is a particular ancestor being sought. On the other hand, responses to age and aging are innumerable—and not always accurate and/or honest. What should the researcher do—be skeptical about the reliability or authenticity of age information or accept reports and documents at face value?
Some families have passed stories from generation to generation about a relative who lived an especially long time, only to discover when they obtain official documents that the story was not so accurate since the recorded age was “not so old.” Even this we must not dismiss out of hand. Some turn-of-the 20th-century tombstones in the Zikhron Ya’akov Cemetery near Haifa describe a person as having lived to “a ripe age”—yet some of them died in their fifties and sixties, hardly a “ripe age” from our contemporary standpoint. When life expectancy was much shorter than it is today, a person who reached 60 or more was considered old.
The congregation I served in the early 1970s in Buffalo, New York, decided to organize its membership files and sent a questionnaire to all members. One response was from an elderly friend of mine. On the line that asked for date of birth, she filled in the date, but next to “year” she wrote in capital letters “none of your business!!”
When genealogists recover a new ancestral name, year of birth generally is considered one of the most important pieces of information about that individual. On the other hand, those who have been tracing family history for any amount of time know that what is recorded as year of birth in many documents, including even official documents, “ain’t necessarily so.”
Some mistakes on official documents are purely accidental. In the 1950s, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania required that the year of birth appear on drivers’ licenses. My maternal grandfather, who had been driving since before World War I, received an official form to complete. When his new license arrived, his year of birth was recorded as 1882 and not 1883, the actual year he was born. When I called his attention to the error, he explained that his insurance agent had told him that since the Motor Vehicle Bureau had no record of his actual year of birth, he should take the opportunity to make himself younger. Knowing that the insurance premium was lower for younger drivers, the agent advised him to “chop off a few years.” My scrupulously honest grandfather, not wanting to exaggerate, decided that one year would not matter much—but instead of making himself younger he became a year older! Thus, an official document issued by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania bore an incorrect birth year, supplied in error by my grandfather.
Sometimes an age difference had life-or-death ramifications. Between December 2, 1938, and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, some 10,000 unaccompanied children were sent to England as part of the Kindertransport. Infants to children of age 16 were eligible. The children traveled with passports, and documentation was scrupulous; making them younger in order to qualify must have been next to impossible. Yet, one report in the autumn of 2005 Kindertransport Newsletter states: “We left Frankfurt on 3 May 1939. A total of 34 students were rescued before 3 September 1939, all members of the Kindertransport and all over 16.” Another document reads:
Officially the upper age limit for the transport was 16 but I, like many others, was almost 18 years old—well above the limit when we arrived in London as part of the Kindertransport. Even with careful checking, some “overage youngsters . . . [who] managed to overcome the age limit.”
Many have heard stories emanating from the Holocaust, where one’s age had the potential to be a death sentence. When selections were made for forced labor, it was important to appear older than one’s chronological age. The honest 14-year-old went directly to his death, while his contemporary who lied about his age gained an opportunity to remain alive and perhaps to survive. Thus, making yourself older than you really were during the Holocaust was a vital strategy in an attempt to live.
The researcher who encounters documentary evidence from this time, such as records of the International Tracing Service (ITS) material, may find incorrect years of birth for some individuals. This is especially evident in the entries for individuals in Mauthausen and Dachau, as well as other forced labor camps. Depending on the age of the person, the year listed may not be correct. People in their twenties or thirties had no reason to lie about their year of birth, but unless a teenager seeking to survive lied about his year of birth, his survival chances were nil. In one situation, for example, about which I know, a youngster was unsure of the year of his birth; Between the tumult and confusion all around him, he could not remember whether he had been born in 1928 or 1929. Interestingly, the ITS records are inconclusive; both dates appeared in the listings.
After the war, age remained an issue in determining one’s future. A few years ago I met a survivor who was visiting Israel. A mutual acquaintance sent him to me for help in locating documentation to clarify his correct age. He related the following: As soon as possible after the war ended, the survivor made his way to Paris and went to the American Joint Distribution Committee (“the Joint”) office to register. He wanted to immigrate to the United States.
When his turn came to meet with the clerk and he told her his true age, he learned that he was “too old” to qualify for admission to the United States. An exception had been made for what were considered “young orphans.” Older survivors would have to wait, possibly years.
The survivor explained that he returned to the Joint office every day for more than a week. He was waiting for a day when the clerk with whom he had met was not there. Finally, one day she was absent, and he then waited his turn in line. He made himself younger by two years in the interview and was able to enter the United States. He became very successful, and now, in his seventies, he wanted to show proof of his actual year of birth. He was unable to get records of his birth from Romania, his native country, and had been told that perhaps Yad Vashem might have some documentation he could use. When I checked his name in the ITS listings, I found both the actual and the fictitious dates of birth. The Joint’s Paris office listed the incorrect year that he gave, while the correct year was recorded in a displaced persons camp listing.
I recently searched Yad Vashem’s ITS records for a friend and provided her with further information about her mother. According to the Bergen-Belsen Namensliste compiled for May 31, 1945, the mother’s birth date was 15.5.20 (May 15, 1920). I found another entry for a woman of the same name whose birth date was given as 15.5.25. I contacted my friend telling her that in addition to her mother, I had found a record of someone who might possibly have been an unknown first cousin. The woman in the second listing was born exactly five years later in the same town in Czechoslovakia.
My friend then told me that the records are one and the same. Her mother had a younger sister who was ill with typhus, and the younger sister was to be evacuated to Sweden for recuperation. The two sisters, after surviving the war together, were about to be separated, something they desperately did not want. Through the “grapevine,” my friend’s mother heard that if she were listed as a younger sister, rather than an older sister, she, too, would be granted entry to Sweden. Since the physical difference between 25 and 20 is not noticeable, she changed the year of her birth from 1920 to 1925, gained entry to Sweden and the sisters remained together.
These examples teach us that genealogists must weigh both the reliability and validity of any source of documentation for age. Sometimes official records include incorrect information. The data may have been provided by parents who sought to protect their children from army service or to enable them to pay a child’s fare on the boat to America for a teenaged child. On other occasions, oral traditions in families add years to the actual age of an elderly patriarch or matriarch. After a certain point, age brings prestige, recognition and status. Careful researchers must always seek to verify an age or birth date, rather than to accept any single recorded date as necessarily correct.
Avotaynu 2007; 23(4):13-14
DOI: 10.17228/AVOT20070413
Copyright 2008 Avotaynu, Inc.
