Hi everyone,
A small theme that I’ve observed during the pandemic is news articles about centenarians (hundred year olds) who have lived through both coronavirus and the 1918 flu. “101-year-old Man Who Survived 1918 Flu Beats Coronavirus, Too”; Meet the 101-year-old who was born on a ship during the 1918 flu pandemic and just beat coronavirus”; 109-year-old North Texas woman shares story of surviving 1918 pandemic”, etc. Many of the articles read like first drafts of an obituary, though they always end with present-day advice from the elderly. For instance, Jewell Hutson, the North Texas woman, wants us to follow the rules, be helpful, and do what we can to not spread coronavirus to somebody else. Scrolling through these articles always leaves me feeling wistful. The photos are heartwarming, the advice often good, and yet the subjects always seem to be bent towards the moment more than the moment ever bends towards them.
According to the UN, there are approximately 573,000 centenarians alive today, meaning that the number of people who came of age before World War II is about equal to the population of Luxembourg. Centenarians have been documented carefully over the past 150 or so years, though statistical modeling indicates that they have likely been around since 2500BC. There are a number of artifacts that point to early centenarians, perhaps mostly notably the tombstone of early-A.D. Roman soldier Julius Valens, re-discovered not far from Cardiff in 1815, which includes the text “VIXIT ANNIS C”, or “lived 100 years”.
To the spirits of the departed; Julius Valens, veteran of the Second Legion Augusta, lived 100 years; Julia Secundina, his wife, and Julius Martinus, his son, had this set up. (Photo source: BBC; Translation source: Roman Inscriptions of Britain)
I remember studying the Civil War in school, and feeling comforted by the vast distance between me and that part of history. It was disorienting, then, when I first encountered Albert Henry Woolson, a drummer boy with the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment. The last surviving Civil War veteran, Albert lived to 106, and died only in 1959, when my parents were in preschool. Seeing a photo of Civil War veteran step out of a car is to me, still, an unsettling anachronism, and it as clear evidence as I can find to reinforce Roberto Bolaño’s judgement that “history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.”
Albert Woolson at age 97, exiting his car, likely a 1942 Hudson, in downtown St. Paul during a 1947 reunion of Civil War troops in the city.( Source: Twin Cities Pioneer Press; Car identification by David Burge, who does this all day long on Twitter).
Along a similar vein, I’ve wondered for a while now whether it would be possible, or interesting, to calculate some sort of shortest path of human life through recorded history. Sort of like a temporal six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but where Kevin Bacon is the 15th century. So I spent some time this weekend poking around, and came to the realization that we are only five lives removed from the Middle Ages.
Kane Tanaka lives in Fukuoka Prefecture, on Kyushu, which is Japan’s southernmost island. Kane was born on January 2, 1903, and she is 117 years and 122 days old today. She’s held the title of the oldest living person for nearly two years, and is almost certainly one of fewer than 100 people who have ever lived to reach age 115. As far as I can tell, she seems to be the only living person who was born before this photo was taken, and the only living person whose life overlapped with Margaret Anne Neve.
Like Kane, Margaret lived on an island (Guernsey), and she was 110 years and 229 days old on the day Kane was born. Margaret was born on May 18, 1792, and is both the first known person to live in three centuries, and one of only two known supercentenarians (110+) to have been born in the 18th century (the other, a Dutch man named Geert Adriaans Boomgaard, died in 1899).
There is some reliable information in the generations that preceded Margaret, though it skews heavily towards the clergy (historically good notetakers), the British (whose National Archive makes use of a thousand years of written record), and the wealthy, (about whom more was likely to be written). Ticking all of these boxes was Ferdinand Ashmall, a priest for the Catholic Church of England and Wales, who was more than 97 years old when Margaret was born in Guernsey. Ferdinand was born on January 9, 1695 in County Durham, located in the northeast of England, less than 80 miles from the Kingdom of Scotland. Ferdinand went to Portugal for a few years as a teenager to train for the priesthood and, upon returning to England (now united with Scotland), he pops up in records from when he was ordained (1720), when he was sick (1727), when he became a priest (1745), and when he died at age 104 (1798).
I couldn’t find any documented centenarians who were nearing the end of their life around the time of Ferdinand’s birth. So, to cast a wider net, I began to search for people known for other things, who were nevertheless quite old when Ferdinand was born. On the gloriously specific Wikipedia article entitled List of last survivors of historical events, I discovered Mary Allerton, the last surviving passenger of the Mayflower, who was about 77 years old when Ferdinand died. Mary was born in Leiden around 1616, and was one of 20 or so children aboard the Mayflower. She settled in Plymouth, raising seven children to adulthood, and died on November 28, 1699 at age 82 or 83. She was interred at Burial Hill, which I actually walked past last October when I stopped in Plymouth for lunch following a wedding. I was a little seasick from the cheap history being peddled at the Rock, so I wasn’t feeling particularly predisposed to stopping by the “first” graveyard to pay any respects. “I don’t care about no stinkin’ pilgrim bones,” I recall thinking to myself.
An illustration of the monument to Mary Allerton, from an 1890 issue of Wide Awake Magazine (source: Wikipedia)
As a child and young adult, Mary happened to overlap with one of the earliest credible centenarians, Laurence Chaderton. Born near Manchester around 1536, Laurence became the first Master of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. He is also remembered for being one of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible. He would have been about 80 years old when Mary Allerton was born in Leiden, though he lived another 24 years, dying on November 13, 1640.
Getting all the way back to Laurence Chaderton’s birth in 1536 was encouraging, and my hope was the the sixth person could bring us back to a time unequivocally medieval. The Byzantine Empire came to a decisive end on May 29,1453 when the Ottomans took Constantinople, so I began searching for people born in 1452. I was rewarded for going through Wikipedia alphabetically, as I quickly arrived at Aisu Iko, a martial artist who founded Kage-ryū, a traditional school of Japanese swordsmanship. Aisu Iko lived to be 86, dying in 1538, when Laurence was about two.
So there we have it. Six people - Kane, Margaret, Ferdinand, Mary, Laurence, and Aisu - connect us from May 3, 2020 to the Middle Ages. Perhaps, whenever Kane dies, I’ll go back down to Plymouth and pay my respects to them all. Or, better yet, maybe a visit to California is in order, to pay my respects to a 4,851 year old tree instead.
Methuselah, a bristlecone pine located in Inyo National Forest in California, is widely believed to be the oldest tree on Earth. (Source: Flickr).
Something I Noticed
Last May, I had the pleasure of participating in TwentyForty, a creative writing project put on by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) in Berlin. Alongside twelve researchers, I wrote about the opportunities and challenges that digital technologies present for society, myself focusing on learning and education. What emerged from that project was just released as an open access book that you can download or read online at https://twentyforty.hiig.de/. My contribution is called “Something I Noticed”. I’d love to know what you think!
Thanks for reading,
-- Grif
P.S. Looking for some indoor exercise? I recently rediscovered Hip Hop for Kids on Youtube, a VHS that my mom tells me my sister and I probably watched 50 times growing up. We put it on during a video chat this morning and went through all the steps for the first time in probably 25 years. Great music, great outfits, great energy, great moves. I highly recommend it!