Friday 16 November 2018

The Youngest

Continuing with a slightly different post format again this week, I'm looking at the life spans of my great grandparents this time, following on from last week's post about the life spans of my great great grandparents.

In last week's post, I looked at the respective ages that each of my 2x great grandparents reached, and discovered they mostly had very long life spans.  This was a little out of the ordinary, given they were all born in the early 1800s when the average lifespan was around 50 to 55 years of age.

For this week's post, I thought I'd look at a younger generation of direct ancestors - my maternal and paternal great grandparents.  I wondered what sort of interesting facts might come to light.  In particular, I wondered at the difference between the majority of lifespans and the which was the shortest.

Out of the 8 great grandparents ...
3 lived into their 80s
2 lived into their 70s
1 made it to the age of 60
1 lived until her late 50s
and 1 only survived until the age of 30.

Quite a spread, but as it turns out it was a great grandparent that had the shortest lifespan out of the two different generations of direct ancestors.  His life span was quite short indeed.


The 3 great grandparents that lived into their 80s included:


died aged 89



died aged 86



died aged 86


The 2 that lived into their 70s were:


died aged 79


died aged 70




The 1 great grandparent that lived until the age of 60:



died aged 60



The great grandparent that lived to her 50s was:


died aged 58



The great grandparent that died at the youngest age (out of great and great great grandparents) was:



died aged 30


Strangely, Edmond O'Donnell, the great grandparent who died at the youngest age, was the son of John O'Donnell, my 2x great grandparent who lived to be the oldest in that generation of direct ancestors!


Another interesting set of facts I garnered from the life stories of my great grandparents were the ages they all became parents for the first time.

On my paternal side:
Thomas Connors and Susan Hukins became parents when they were aged 24 and 23 respectively.

Richard Brown and Ellen Cusack were aged 23 and 22 respectively when they had their first child.

On the maternal side however, the facts were a little different and they were mostly older:
Owen McCane (Muckian) and Margaret Farrell were aged 33 and 27 respectively when they became parents for the first time.

Whilst Edmond O'Donnell was only aged 22 when he became a father, his wife Bridget Burke was aged 33.

Interestingly, all my paternal great grandparents were born in Australia.  Indeed, they were all born in New South Wales.  My maternal great grandparents were from Ireland (that's the case for 3 of them) and from England.


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