Age is just a number.

 

Mary Treacy Degnan, Frank Kelly, Anne Treacy Fenlon, Emmett Fenlon, Milo Lacy, Edward J. Fenlon, Jr. at 123 Woodland Ave on 28 May 1938.

    Today's post examines the question of age and what people report as their date of birth (DOB) in various circumstances. As you might recall, this issue has previously come up in the Immigrant Ancestor blog post about Edward J. Fenlon, Sr.  

    The new set of mismatched DOBs comes up in the context of new family history documents that Ethan and I obtained in response to Bill C-3, the Canadian law that passed in December 2025. This bill governs Canadian citizenship by descent. Amazingly, it makes anyone who has a Canadian ancestor a citizen retroactively to their birth! So, all of us who are descended from Janet MacDonell Treacy qualify. I will post more about Bill C-3 in the future, but if you want to know more you can email me about it at any time. 

    We all know that my grandmother Anne Treacy Fenlon was born on 21 Dec 1909, about a month after her husband Emmett was born. Her recently obtained birth certificate from Onondaga County confirms this date. However, her marriage certificated lists 31 Dec 1910 as her DOB and Emmett with his real DOB of 12 Nov 1909 (Figure 1). 

Figure 1. Marriage certificate of Anne Treacy and Emmett Fenlon from the City of Syracuse showing Anne's DOB as 12/31/10. 

    The change of DOB on the marriage certificate was very interesting to me, so I complied many genealogy records for Anne and Emmett and have arranged them by the reported birth year in Table 1. One thing to note is that Emmet's years are more consistent than Anne's. 

    I think that in this historical period it was considered proper for a wife to be a year or two younger than her husband, so this might explain why from the year of the marriage certificate (1938) onwards Anne is always listed this way.  I am not sure why Emmett is listed as a year younger than his actual age on the 1940 & 1950 US Census or why Anne changed the day of the month (31st vs 21st) on the marriage certificate. 

    To further explore this, I did similar comparisons for Anne's mother Janet MacDonell, her older sister Mary G. Treacy, and her younger sister Catherine V. Treacy.  Janet's dates are shown in Table 2 and are consistent for the most part, but the wedding record stands out. John is listed as a year older than his actual age, which makes it appear as if Janet is two years younger than him. Once again, the male's birth years are more consistent. 

    Anne's older sister Mary was born on 12 Jul 1906 and her husband Francis (Frank) J. Degnan was born on 9 Jul 1897, although many records put his birth at 1898. Mary & Frank's marriage certificate from 1928 is very interesting with respect to their ages.  They did not fill out the DOB question, but they did list their ages.  Mary's age is accurate (22 years old). For Frank the typed age is 28, but hand-written over the top of the 8 is a 4, changing his age to 24 years old (Figure 2).  So in this case, the actual age difference of ~9 years or even the 6 years on the form originally was too large, so it was adjusted to the ideal delta of 2 years! On the 1950 US census the delta of their ages is back up to 6 years. Mary is accurately listed as 43 years old (she would turn 44 in July of 1950) and Frank is listed as 49 years old -- putting his birth year at 1900 instead of 1897/8.  

Figure 2 Marriage certificate of Frank Degnan & Mary Treacy from 24 Dec 1928. 

    Finally we come to Anne's younger sister Catherine V. Treacy, who was born on 12 Jan 1912. Her husband Francis (Frank) J. Kelly was born in Northern Ireland on 15 Feb 1900, so the delta on their ages is ~12 years. Here I have the least amount of data -- only the 1950 US census, which accurately lists both of their ages (Figure 3)! I am mailing a request for their marriage certificate to the City of Syracuse and I will update this post when I receive it in a couple of weeks. Any predictions?  My guess is that their age delta will be significantly less than 12 years on this document. 

Figure 3. The Kelly family on the 1950 US census.  Frank and Catherine's ages are listed accurately here. Will they also be accurate on the marriage certificate? Watch this space!