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Subject: Re: Hee Haa!! Grandma is found but I have a ?
Date: 2 Aug 2006 18:55:09 -0600

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Classification: Query

Message Board URL:

http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/QIB.2ACI/8768.3.1.1.1.1

Message Board Post:

Dear Chris,

I believe you mentioned something about discrepancies in ages and these are Irish, correct?

My Irish grandmother was born in 1876 (have baptismal record and have her on the 1880 censuses for St. Louis (both of them-seems St. Louis had problems with counting people). Each subsequent census, she got younger and younger. By 1930, my grandmother she was 44 years old. If you compared my grandparents' ages and age at first marriage on the 1930 census, you would have concluded that my grandfather most likely had been married before. By stating her age as 44 on this census, she was born 6 years after her father died and was also born after her 1/2 brothers from her mother's second marriage. My grandmother was not the only one who fibbed about her age-so did her sister by about the same amount.

As I have gotten older, I can understand how the census taker may have misheard the names and other information. With hearing loss, certain letters are hard to distinquish from each other and if a foreign language was involved, that further complicates matters. I have noticed that some people that I know who were born in Ireland seem to pronounce the "th" sound almost like "d".

Georgia

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