In a message dated 08/10/2007 22:36:44 GMT Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: I have a JOHN WESTGARTH D.O.B. 1672 in STANHOPE I have been given his date of death as 1824 which would have made him 101 years old According to the version of arithmetic I was taught at school (the correct one, I believe) he would have had his 152nd birthday some time in 1824 and so would have died aged 151 or 152, not 101! even that assumes it was an infant baptism, which it may not have been. Obviously incorrect great ages often seem to arise because someone has assumed that he must have been baptised in the parish wherein he died and has looked back through the baptism register until they found an entry with the right name. If that was 152 years before the death then "he must have lived to 152". It is much more likely that he was not baptised there, but in some other parish or possibly not in a Church of England Parish Church at all. Moral - always be aware of your (or others') assumptions, and treat them as just that, unevidenced assumptions which are definitely unproven and hence unworthy of having grand (or any) theories founded upon them. Before accepting any baptism, even one at a plausible, or likely, date, we should always search forward for a few years after that in the burial registers to see whether the person concerned died in infancy or in childhood or youth. In my experience many false pedigrees have resulted from that simple precaution not having been taken. Geoff Nicholson