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walkitoutI was reading a long piece at the New Yorker about Jeanne Calment.
It contained this parenthetical remark: "(The United States didn’t have a centralized birth-registration system until 1933.)"
I have done a fair amount of genealogical work, quite a lot of which involves US records. I am here to tell you that the US does NOT have a centralized birth registration system now and has not ever. And is unlikely to ever have one. That is a State level responsibility. I do not know who Lauren Collins is, but if you are going to try to convince me that you are Up To figuring out the truth of allegations and counter-allegations about whether the Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 was actually 122 or somewhat younger, then, you cannot really be making errors of this magnitude.
In general, I am skeptical of super-centenarians (and I say this as someone with a lot of ancestors and collaterals who made it past 100). More importantly, when I realized that I have not one, but two first cousins who have birth certificates for different years from different countries, I recognized that no matter how good your BMD system is, someone is going to monkey with it. It might be difficult to monkey with it now (altho, having just read Tara Westover's _Educated_ and learned that she was able to get a delayed birth certificate in her teens, I have some questions even here), in the 1930s, it was pretty fucking straightforward to get a bunch of officials and relatives and People Who Know You to go along with a scam. A little bit of money helps. A sob story helps. Being a close relative helps.
If you feel like reading the article, here it is:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud
From my perspective, the argument about the taxes is irrelevant. Could the family have paid the taxes? Sure! But that does not matter, because any family that produces someone who marries a double second cousin is a family that has fucking machined the art of keeping assets in the family. The only argument that matters to me is the simple observation that basically, no one lives that long, and everyone who seems to get close is someone who has habits that make it even more unlikely they lived that long, and has really great documentation in an area that has holes in the documentation. People who say they are 140 but were born in a place that had no documentation are not taken seriously by people who track this shit. And once the documentation hits a certain quality level, you no longer get supercentenarians. Because all of the supercentenarians (not the 103s and 105s -- the 120s, like Calment) are probably frauds.
ETA: I got to thinking about the question Collins raises towards the end about the notary public.
Googling found me this:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/notary_fraud.html
So much about this is hilarious -- the comment about Greece, in particular. Spain really caught my eye, because they had that enormous scandal recently about events during Franco's era, in which women were told their baby had died in childbirth, and then the baby was given to a supporter of Franco to raise. (Spain caught my eye for other reasons as well. And I do always love it when people from Greece make efforts to show that their "system" for recording real estate transactions is ... not risible.)
It contained this parenthetical remark: "(The United States didn’t have a centralized birth-registration system until 1933.)"
I have done a fair amount of genealogical work, quite a lot of which involves US records. I am here to tell you that the US does NOT have a centralized birth registration system now and has not ever. And is unlikely to ever have one. That is a State level responsibility. I do not know who Lauren Collins is, but if you are going to try to convince me that you are Up To figuring out the truth of allegations and counter-allegations about whether the Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 was actually 122 or somewhat younger, then, you cannot really be making errors of this magnitude.
In general, I am skeptical of super-centenarians (and I say this as someone with a lot of ancestors and collaterals who made it past 100). More importantly, when I realized that I have not one, but two first cousins who have birth certificates for different years from different countries, I recognized that no matter how good your BMD system is, someone is going to monkey with it. It might be difficult to monkey with it now (altho, having just read Tara Westover's _Educated_ and learned that she was able to get a delayed birth certificate in her teens, I have some questions even here), in the 1930s, it was pretty fucking straightforward to get a bunch of officials and relatives and People Who Know You to go along with a scam. A little bit of money helps. A sob story helps. Being a close relative helps.
If you feel like reading the article, here it is:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud
From my perspective, the argument about the taxes is irrelevant. Could the family have paid the taxes? Sure! But that does not matter, because any family that produces someone who marries a double second cousin is a family that has fucking machined the art of keeping assets in the family. The only argument that matters to me is the simple observation that basically, no one lives that long, and everyone who seems to get close is someone who has habits that make it even more unlikely they lived that long, and has really great documentation in an area that has holes in the documentation. People who say they are 140 but were born in a place that had no documentation are not taken seriously by people who track this shit. And once the documentation hits a certain quality level, you no longer get supercentenarians. Because all of the supercentenarians (not the 103s and 105s -- the 120s, like Calment) are probably frauds.
ETA: I got to thinking about the question Collins raises towards the end about the notary public.
Googling found me this:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/notary_fraud.html
So much about this is hilarious -- the comment about Greece, in particular. Spain really caught my eye, because they had that enormous scandal recently about events during Franco's era, in which women were told their baby had died in childbirth, and then the baby was given to a supporter of Franco to raise. (Spain caught my eye for other reasons as well. And I do always love it when people from Greece make efforts to show that their "system" for recording real estate transactions is ... not risible.)
no subject
Date: 2020-02-14 02:43 am (UTC)National vital statistics
Date: 2020-02-14 01:58 pm (UTC)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219884/
It is difficult to summarize exactly how things work with birth registration (other than what I said, which is that It Does Not Exist on the national level in the US — it is handled completely by the states, territories, etc.). What happened in 1933 was the moment at which all states were actually participating in the national birth registration area (which means the states were collecting the data, in appropriate forms, etc. — but even that was not and is not standardized). At the national level, statistics are generated, but I do not believe there is any national level database that collects everything in the underlying state databases (oh, seriously, prove to me I am wrong. It would be delightful to be wrong!).
Focusing on 1933 is weird, tho, because the system existed prior to that, it is just that is when everyone finally was participating more or less appropriately.
Nothing about this inspires any confidence in anything else the author had to say in the article.
Anyway.
I have been thinking, a lot, about what is involved in pulling off something like what Yvonne Clement (if it actually happened, it was not Jeanne who did it in the long run, it was Yvonne, even if it was likely Jeanne’s idea at least in part) is alleged by some to have done. Obviously, the cooperation of her immediate family was imperative. Which really makes that otherwise sad and tragic but oh so very mid 20th century string of deaths around Jeanne look very different. Were they trying to get a better deal / cut of the money that was once Jeanne’s? Did Yvonne get annoyed and basically create opportunities for them to Not Exist Anymore?
It is pretty trivial to find tons of stories online of people who pulled Parent Trap style switches (identical twins who trade places, either as a one-off or more often). The most common reason given that I have seen is twins in school who exploit the fact that one of the twins is better at English and the other better at Math (or whatever) and so they swap for tests to improve grades. While some of the stories involve getting caught, some involve continuing to do this for a while.
I will note that there was a point in my life when I was the same height as one of my older sisters. My younger sister, that older sister (not the oldest — she had completely different coloring than the rest of us, hair, eyes, etc.) and I would go shopping and be mistaken for triplets. If we had one of our cousins with us, people inevitably thought she was our sister, or twin, not a cousin. This was not an occasional thing, and we did not think of ourselves as looking particularly alike, and we dressed differently and had different hair styles and I wore glasses. For more than a year, my father would routinely look me straight in the face, and not just call me by the wrong name (every parent does that once in a while, and sometimes tosses dog or cat names in as well), but genuinely believe that I was that older sister. My mother struggled sometimes too (this was a problem, when she would try to get me to drive her someplace, and I was not yet old enough to drive). Once, my sister wanted her mail picked up at her post office box, and for some reason did not want to or could not go, so she had me go get it for her. She said, just take your glasses off when you go to pick it up. A friend of mine is working this shift, she will think that you are me and hand you the mail. Just smile and say hi and it will be fine. The woman there did indeed greet me as my sister, and asked if I had changed my hair. I smiled and said hi and said something vague, got the mail and got out of there (probably NOT a violation of mail law, as I had permission of the person who it was supposed to go to and I never claimed I was my sister, I just let that assumption stand).
Anyone who wanders around saying that Oh It Would Be Impossible to fake that one person is another person, obviously has never participated in this particular type of shenanigan. Which is fine. And while you might think, oh, but it would not work for a mother and daughter, I do not see any obvious reason why it would not. There are mother daughter pairs who look a lot alike, and if they are even a bit disconnected from the larger community (such as by a stay at a san for a period of months or a year or more), they ought to be able to pull off a switch with the support of the immediate family.
ETA:
I cannot believe I forgot to add this! I went on a Disney cruise and stayed on the concierge level (I was celebrating a retirement milestone and splurged on the Roy cabin and the connector, so we were memorable to the concierge staff). I brought my sister (younger — not the one from the post office story above). And this was Christmas 2018, so at the time my sister and I were in our late forties. She weighs a lot less than I do, I wear glasses, our hair is substantially different, etc. etc. We were wearing similar clothing (because we tip each other off to things we like, we were wearing identical style but different colors of button down UPF shirts, and same style same color technical fabric skirts for much of the trip), and after several hours in each others’ company, we sound very, very similar (I have an overlay of a northeastern accent normally, and she has an overlay of a southern accident normally, but we revert to Native PNW when we are together. People have commented. Repeatedly. And with vast confusion as to what the hell just happened). Anyway. Concierge staff gets their jobs because they are awesome at remembering faces and names, and the lounge on the cruise at that level does a cocktail hour. My sister and I drink very, very different drinks. And the bartender kept getting us mixed up.