{"id":8498,"date":"2019-03-03T18:13:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-03T18:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/?p=8498"},"modified":"2019-03-03T18:13:00","modified_gmt":"2019-03-03T18:13:00","slug":"calculating-an-age-range","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/?p=8498","title":{"rendered":"Calculating An Age Range"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Ages given in any document can easily be incorrect. That doesn’t mean they should not be analyzed.<\/p>\n

The Civil War pension for Riley Rampley provides six ages for him at different times. I was curious just how consistent these ages were.<\/p>\n

The six ages provided in the pension application are shown on the chart. The dates on which the ages were given range from 1886 through 1893.<\/p>\n

Those ages were used to create a range of birth dates for each age. Then to see how consistent the birth date ranges were a timeline was created. The ages were not entirely consistent, but they were relatively close. Given that ages can easily be off by a year or two in any given record, this is not a surprise.<\/p>\n

All of the ages given are consistent with a date of birth between July and October of 1835. That’s not a wide range of dates. Riley’s “known” date of birth of 25 August 1835 falls within that range.<\/p>\n

Ages given for individuals will not always be consistent, but if you’ve got a person with varying ages such an analysis may be helpful in reaching a conclusion about when they probably were born.<\/p>\n

\"\"And it may also help you to determine if one age is so far off from the others that it might have been a clear error.<\/p>\n

The assumptions I made in this analysis were that:<\/p>\n