Hi all, At the suggest of a subscriber to the list a piece from RootsWeb Review. So for those of you who don't subscribe, here's an article from one of their recent email letters. This is something that we all need to look at in our family trees. kemis ----- Original Message ----- The plug for the Rootsweb Review was a good idea. Coincidentally, a subscriber posted to a surname mailing list I receive, the following, from this week's issue. I thought you might consider posting it on the Muscogee and Chattahoochee Co. lists for those who don't subscribe or may have missed it. (Oddly, I haven't received my Rootsweb Review this week, for some reason.) <<RootsWeb Review: Vol. 7, No. 18, 5 May 2004 1c. TIPS FROM READERS: Plausibility Factor Ancient Mothers: Possible, but not Likely By Gregg Bonner of Michigan I have noticed that many people who publish genealogical material do not bother to test whether the information is plausible. This is usually due to a lack of event-date association. When precise dates are not known people often neglect to enter any date information at all. However, if the author had entered even the broadest of possible date ranges for the events in question, then he would recognize that the sequence as a whole is not plausible for ANY set of particular dates he might pose as a possibility. Once the date ranges were given, it would become clear that to make the line possible, one person would have to live to be well over 100, or else another person would have to be a grandfather at age 25, or else some other equally unlikely occasion would need occur. The problem with many such pedigrees is that they are maintained under the argument that they are possible, and no effort is made to see that they are also plausible. One of the greatest classes of offenders is the "ancient mother" syndrome. Women really do not give birth to children in their 50s, excepting extraordinarily rare instances. To illustrate my point, I take data from the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, 1998 Natality Statistics. These figures show that among the nearly four million live births in the United States in 1998, only about 160 of them were to women aged 50 and above. This represents approximately 0.004% of live child births. The oldest age category given is age 54, for which there were six live births. To make the point more vivid, compare to the five live births to mothers aged 10. Continuing the theme, there were 19 live child births to mothers aged 53, compared to 23 born to mothers aged 11. In sum, the total of live births to mothers aged 50 or more is LESS than the number of live births to mothers aged 12 or younger. Please note also that these data include all manner of modern fertility treatments that would not have been available to our ancestors. I have had many people tell me that it is relatively common for women to have children in their mid-50s, only to proceed to point out several cases from their own database. These, however, are not cases of bona fide live child births to women aged 50 and greater -- these are rather simply errors. In a database of 25,000 persons, you can expect a grand total of approximately ONE person to have been born to a mother aged 50 or more. REPRINTS. Permission to reprint articles from RootsWeb Review is granted unless specifically stated otherwise, provided: (1) the reprint is used for non-commercial, educational purposes; and (2) the following notice appears at the end of the article: Previously published in RootsWeb Review: Vol. 7, No. 18, 5 May 2004.>>