Longevity
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
My Ancestry tree is not huge by some standards, but, with almost 14,000 individuals, it is too large to search manually to figure out who has lived the longest. So I did what I frequently do when I’m trying to find specific information like this – I downloaded by GEDCOM from Ancestry, converted it to an Excel spreadsheet, did some fiddley formatting stuff, and then sorted it by “Lifespan” and “Direct Ancestor.”
I know there are some desktop genealogy programs that will do this for you, but I don’t use any of those. To do this type of specific task, I used FamilyTreeAnalyzer – a free GEDCOM reading program that allows users to export their GEDCOM file to Excel. If you haven’t tried this, you should give it a whirl.
Doing this helped me identify my direct ancestors who lived the longest. About 50 of them appear to have lived into their 90s, but what I discovered was that the longest lifespans were indicated for individuals about whom I knew very little. The oldest (living to 99 or 100) were in the 16th or 17th century, and I was more than a little uncertain about the dates I had for them. The oldest ancestor whose details I could verify was my 3rd great-grandfather Wiley Roberts, featured at the top of this essay. He lived to be 95 years old, which is pretty good I think.
Here's what I know about him. He was born in North Carolina, served in the War of 1812 from that state, and relocated to Overton County, Tennessee, in the 1820s. His daughter Caroline (my 2nd great-grandmother) was born there in 1832. He was a teacher, according to one source. The family moved to Morgan County, Illinois, by 1850, and Caroline married George Thomas there in 1852. Caroline and George had three children, including my great-grandmother Mary Elizabeth Thomas, before George died in by 1860.
So far as I can tell, Wiley continued to live with Caroline and her family for most of the rest of her life. The entire family moved to Nebraska by the middle of the 1870s, and that’s where Wiley died in 1878.
I am certain about all of this information. It is recent enough that records exist and are findable. In addition, because Mary Elizabeth Thomas (Wiley’s granddaughter) married into the Workman family, all of these people are well documented in a massive book called Workman Family History, published in the 1960s. My mother’s maiden name was Workman, and she had a copy of this book. I have it now, and it sits on my bookshelf.
The author of this book, Thelma Chidester Anderson, is connected to the Workman family by marriage, but she made it her life’s work to document this family back to their colonial origins in New Amsterdam in the 1640s. She did all of this the hard way – travelling around the country and talking to people who had family bibles and other records that documented the family. The portrait of Wiley that I used for this essay was in her book. According to Miss Anderson,
“A tintype and a few coins that Wiley Roberts had in his pockets at the time of his death . . . were kept by his daughter Caroline Roberts Thomas. Upon her death at Exeter, Nebraska, in January 1904, the tintype and coins were sent to her daughter Mary Elizabeth Thomas Workman and have subsequently become the treasured possessions of Mary Etta Workman Fouts.”
I don’t know where the original of this photo is now. Mary Etta died in 1988 (several decades after the book was published), and her children have also passed away. I can’t find any evidence that her daughter Caroline (the only child to live to adulthood) had any children, so I don’t know where the tintype and coins are today. I’d like to find these items.
Hi, Karen! It’s interesting to think about the tintype and the coins and how significant they were to the family. I wish you could find them.