Talk:List of American supercentenarians

Amy Barnard born in North Carolina in 1750 is listed on the North Carolina census for slaves over 100 years of age. She is 110 in 1860. She is listed under her owner Joseph Barnard of Buncombe County, North Carolina. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mnorman16 (talk • contribs) 12:53, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Delphia Welford

This Wikipedia article currently misinforms the reader about Delphia Welford's case by giving the impression that her date of birth and age are perfectly and precisely known without any uncertainty about the exact day. I believe that it is our mission, as Wikipedia contributors, not to mislead the readers, not to misinform them, and on the contrary to inform them with the most factual, reliable and verifiable information.

Delphia Welford's GRG validation

Usually, the GRG or LongeviQuest verify and validate the claimed birth and death dates of supercentenarians (as given by known primary sources), and therefore their age. This is a sort of endorsement that the given documentation for the supercentenarian is exact.

However, in the specific case of Delphia Welford, the GRG did not validate a claimed date of birth. On the contrary, the GRG rejected all four officially documented birth dates of Delphia Welford (documented by the US administration or by her tombstone, see below) and instead validated her case by giving a fifth date of birth, which doesn't appear in any document! Such extraordinary and unusual validation is expected to be very well-argued and the new birthdate to be explained and justified, especially for such an exceptional age as 117. However, there’s unfortunately no such thing in the current GRG validation. It simply claims, without providing any evidence, that the investigation of her age “proves beyond reasonable doubt that Delphia Welford had been born in Okolona, Chickasaw County, Mississippi, on Sept. 9, 1875”. The reader is apparently expected to believe this just because they say so, and despite contradictory evidence that this date is unproven (see below)…

The validation adds that “The detailed report on the case validation of Delphia Welford will be presented at the supercentenarian seminar in Paris later this year”, and indeed this was in the program of the 15th Supercentenarian seminar in Paris in November 2023. Unfortunately, contrary to many other presentations of this seminar, this presentation has not been published.

Delphia Welford's factual information

Her date of birth is stated as “April 1876” in the 1900 census, “September 9, 1880” on her Social Security application in 1965, “September 9, 1881” in the Social Security Death Index, while finally “October 15, 1881” was engraved on her headstone. The earliest known documents mentioning her are the June 1880 census, where she is listed at two addresses in Okolona, Mississippi, aged “5”, the September 1880 under-21 population alphabetical list, where she is also listed twice, aged “4” and “5”, and the Mississippi lists of educable children from July 1885 and July 1892, where she is noted as being “8” and “16”, respectively.

Uncertainty about her exact date of birth

This, together with the existence of two younger siblings born after her and before the June 1880 census, proves beyond reasonable doubt that she was born no later than mid-1877 and died aged at least 115, and most likely at least 116. But, as frustrating as it may be, this does not prove any precise date of birth.

Given these facts, there are obviously 3 hypotheses which can be made for Delphia Welford’s birthdate:

• (1) Delphia Welford had simply no idea of her exact date of birth, so that all dates which she gave (in 1900, for a census where it is stated that she cannot read or write, and in 1965 for the Social Security) are just pure guesses (like it seems to be the case for all of her siblings, for instance for her younger brother Charles who was born in March 1885 according to the 1900 census but on 14 Feb 1882 according to his 1918’s WWI draft registration card, and on 16 May 1882 according to the SS Death Index…),
• or (2) she was born in April 1876 as noted in the 1900 census (the earliest documents being usually the most reliable about date of birth),
• or (3) although it is proven that she gave an incorrect birth year in her much later 1965's SS claim, she was still correct there for the day and month, and was therefore born on a 9 September, certainly in 1875 or 1876 or 1874.

The consensus among most analysts (but not the GRG) is that her exact date of birth remains uncertain.

The above hypotheses (1) or (2) seem to be the most likely, although they are frustrating as they mean that her precise date of birth remains unknown. However, the GRG concluded with the hypothesis (3), and specifically with its 1875 variant. Of course, such conclusion has got the practical advantage of bringing a precise birth date, but which is unproven and even likely to be wrong.

Conclusion for this article

• If we were to adopt a perfectly objective and scientific stance, we would not rank her with the supposed 9 September 1875 date but rather with the most conservative date of her proven birthdate's interval, which could be defined as 2 June 1877 (3 years before the 1880 census, considering that someone reported as 5 years old could not be younger than 3 years old, which age would in addition match the 8 years reported in 1885). Or, if we would be a little less conservative, we could use the 30 April 1876 date, relying on the 1900 census. However, this would probably be considered as original work, so we likely cannot do that. The best is probably to keep the date proposed by the GRG but with at least mentioning the absence of consensus for it because of its residual uncertainty.
• The least we should do, I believe, is indeed to mention that some uncertainty remains about her exact date of birth, and/or that there’s no consensus about it. This is what I tried to do but my edit was reverted because the sourcing was considered insufficient. I will rewrite it in a more thoroughly sourced way, as we do have very reliable sources.

Carfois (talk) 09:09, 16 December 2025 (UTC) Carfois (talk) 09:09, 16 December 2025 (UTC)

The 110 club is definitely NOT a reliable source and cannot be used in Wikipedia. Family search also cannot be used as unreliable/primary sourcing. The rest looks like a lot of original research to me. We will need input from other experienced editors as to whether any of it can be used. DerbyCountyinNZ ^{(Talk Contribs)} 19:50, 16 December 2025 (UTC)

I’m very surprised with your opinion about FamilySearch, a very widely used source on Wikipedia (2,734 direct Wikilinks to this date on the English Wikipedia, most of which being in a FamilySearch sourcing). FamilySearch is at the same time:

• an extremely reliable primary source (images from the censuses, vital records, etc.), actually the most reliable source which you can find, exactly as reliable as records from official administrations (with which they often have partnerships and for which they sometimes digitalize records). I’ve been using FamilySearch for decades (initially when their documents could only be accessed on site on microfilms) and never found a single fake document in their images. These are faithful plain photographs of the official censuses, vital records, etc.
• and a rather reliable secondary source (record's transcriptions and biographical summaries that are in general thoroughly sourced by primary sources), not 100% reliable but at least more reliable than Wikipedia or newspapers in general. Furthermore, when it is a secondary source, it can usually be easily verified with the primary sources (which are directly linked in the "sources" fields and tabs), so that the reliability of a particular record can usually easily be assessed (this is the case for Delphia Welford where their biographical summary is fully sourced, except for the date 9 September 1875).

About the GRG, this organization maintains the only fully global database of supercentenarians together with the more recent LongeviQuest database, so they are a reference for this. However, there are unfortunately some cases where their reliability is far from perfect, so that in case of discrepancies with other sources, a critical analysis should be made (e.g. for Shigechiyo Izumi or Lucy Hannah before they finally made correction, now for some details about Delphia Welford for instance). About Delphia Welford, you can note that neither the GRG nor LongeviQuest provide any primary source nor logical demonstration in support to the 9 September 1875 date. You can note also that they give a different birth year for her son (LongeviQuest says "1899" whereas the GRG says "1896", while the factual truth is that his exact date of birth is unknown, just like for his mother). I don’t understand why both organizations have now got this tendency to fill-in the blanks of uncertainty with speculations but it’s unfortunately a fact that they sometimes do this, as this example shows - for the son, our Wikipedia article properly reflects the uncertainty by saying that he was born "in the late 1890s".

Carfois (talk) 02:10, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

I think the footnote in List of the verified oldest people 'Some uncertainty remains regarding Delphia Welford's exact date of birth, which during her lifetime was never given as 9 September 1875, and is recorded as “April 1876” in the 1900 census, which would correspond to an age-at-death of 116 years and 198 to 228 days. Her gravestone gives a date of birth of 15 October 1881, corresponding to an age of 111, and that age is also given in her obituary.' should be applied to this article as well. Sneakysasquatchfan (talk) 03:51, 5 April 2026 (UTC)

Sources

@Carfois. The110Club is user-generated content - it is not a reliable source per WP:UGC. It is not appropriate for use on Wikipedia. The same goes for the FamilySearch note - that is also user-generated content and hence unreliable in the Wikipedia sense.

The Gibbs and Zak piece is a WP:SPS; self-published source. Self-published sources are acceptable only when produced by experts. Gibbs and Zak are not experts - they are WP:FRINGE within the field of longevity research and push the conspiracy theory that Jeanne Calment was swapped with her daughter. This is also not a reliable source.

"Many analysts consider" is also WP:SYNTH.

Please self-revert per WP:ONUS and obtain consensus for the inclusion of this material. Katzrockso (talk) 22:07, 30 December 2025 (UTC)

Actually the entire section cited to the primary source documents is not WP:DUE for inclusion, so I would ask that you remove all of the content you have added. Katzrockso (talk) 22:13, 30 December 2025 (UTC)

@Katzrockso, many thanks for your detailed explanations. I understand your concerns about the reliability of the sources. Of course, Wikipedia needs to use the most reliable sources because the primary objective of Wikipedia is to provide the reader with the most reliable and accurate information.

Precisely, in order to achieve this objective, we, Wikipedia contributors, should have an accurate assessment of the reliability of the sources, on a case by case basis.

In the field of American supercentenarians, the GRG has performed some remarkable work and is in general the most reliable secondary source, however unfortunately they also have a historical record of sometimes validating unproven dates of birth (e.g. for Shigechiyo Izumi and Lucy Hannah), failing to mention the uncertainty and officially maintaining such claims for years despite an adverse consensus in the supercentenarian researchers community.

Therefore, should Wikipedia be a blind copy-paste of the GRG’s lists, or should we have a more critical approach and take into account the specifics of each case and some other sources ?

For Delphia Welford, it’s a brutal fact that not a single official document gives 9 September 1875 as her date of birth and that no proof has ever been given by anyone that this is her date of birth. The quasi-consensus among supercentenarian researchers is that her approximative date of birth is known within a time window of a few years, but her exact date of birth remains unfortunately unknown, the only exception to this quasi-consensus being the GRG and LongeviQuest (founded by an ex-GRG member) in their 2023/2024 validations of her case. In these validations they claimed 9 September 1875 as her actual birth date but did not even explain on which basis this previously unclaimed date of birth was chosen rather than, for instance, the documented (1900 census) April 1876´s date.

I believe that we should use the sources wisely in order to inform the reader that there’s some uncertainty about Delphia Welford’s date of birth and that the ranking given is therefore also uncertain (Susannah Mushatt Jones is in fact the third oldest consensually verified American person and it is both very unscientific and very unfair to her and to the facts to claim that it is instead Delphia Welford without doubt).

The main problem here in the specific case of Delphia Welford is that the GRG (or LongeviQuest) validation does not validate a documented date of birth, but instead validate their own newly proposed date of birth without providing any proof nor even explanations.

Yes, Gibbs and Zak are here self-published, and yes, they are not always reliable (e.g. their conspiracy theory for Jeanne Calment), but for American supercentenarians they were right against the GRG about Lucy Hannah, and in this specific case of Delphia Welford they are simply very factual. Yes, the 110club is user-created content but in this case it gives the analysis of one of the specific users (« Futurist ») who actually performed extensive research on her case, and gathered official records about her, some of which he was the first to find. Same for FamilySearch. Yes, these three sources are far from perfect but they are in this case more factual and better sourced than the GRG validation itself, which is here even further from perfect.

As a conclusion:

• I totally disagree that the small paragraph with plain facts extensively primary sourced, which you removed is Due and undue weight. This paragraph is very important because not only it brings some life events about Delphia Welford, the only one of the top-8 American supercentenarians who does not have her dedicated article, but also it allows the reader to get some critical understanding of her actual date of birth and age. You may want to shorten it a little but if you completely remove this paragraph, you remove all possibility of critical analysis for the reader, while at the same time the article gives very misleading information, presenting a proposed un-consensual date of birth as if it was an actual certain date and failing to even just mention its uncertainty.
• In the other paragraph which you removed, I propose to change the phrasing "Many analysts consider" into "Some independent researchers consider".
• If you believe that we should rather simply blindly copy-paste the GRG claims and disregards blindly all primary sources and other secondary sources, please let my edits completely removed as you did. I tried to do my best to make Wikipedia a reliable source of information, in a World where beliefs are too often confused with facts. I gave a lot of my time for this generous ideal of source-checking, fact-checking and improving the reliability of information. You removed some factual information in this article so that now it disregards the facts and misleads the reader. I think that it's really a pity for the sake of reliability. But after all, I lost enough time trying to improve the reliability of this article. I let you write and delete whatever you want, I myself cannot lose more energy and time on this if this work is destroyed by a very active contributor like you who seem here to believe that a blind rule is more important for Wikipedia than actual facts and truthful information.

Best regards, Carfois (talk) 13:22, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

@Carfois I only have so much time to respond here, but I will address a few points:

I may have my own criticisms of the GRG, but the validations of Hannah and Izumi are hardly critical. Lucy Hannah was validated by the Kestenbaum study and retracted by the GRG after the disconfirming research was conducted (not by Zak and Gibbs but other researchers). Izumi was recognized by GWR, but never recognized by the GRG.

What you are suggesting we do is conduct original research and then introduce this into Wikipedia. That does not comport with our policies and guidelines. Rather than provide any reliable sources to support these claims, the added text was cited to unreliable sources. You claim that "The quasi-consensus among supercentenarian researchers is that her approximative date of birth is known within a time window of a few years, but her exact date of birth remains unfortunately unknown, the only exception to this quasi-consensus being the GRG and LongeviQuest" but fail to cite any sources in favor of this claim. I'm not aware of any published statements to support this claim. Katzrockso (talk) 16:16, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

Now that I have some more time to respond in length:

You state that it’s a brutal fact that not a single official document gives 9 September 1875 as her date of birth and that no proof has ever been given by anyone that this is her date of birth and later does not validate a documented date of birth, but instead validate their own newly proposed date of birth without providing any proof nor even explanations.. Reliable sources do not need to provide an transparent explanation for their reasoning behind the minutiae. In this case, 9 September 1875 is a very reasonable date. The birthday (9 September) is derived from social security records, where her date of birth is listed as 9 September 1880 in the social security claims index and 9 September 1881 in the social security death index. Given that she was already in the 1880 census in June 1880, she cannot have been born in 1880 or 1881, but an earlier date. The result is preserving the month and day, but changing the year to the year that fits the earliest records (1880 census, schoolchildren's census records) the best. The 1900 census is not particularly reliable for the month and year of birth in many cases (one example is Ottilia Eycleshimer whose 1900 census reports something like November 1894, when her birth record supports her claimed age of 22 August 1893) and has to be considered in the context of other records. The decisions on how to weight these factors to evaluate the age of a supercentenarian is precisely what reliable sources do and not something that Wikipedia should be doing.

As for the concerns that this is not a "documented date of birth" or the subtextual insinuation that validation with a constructed date of birth is a problem, that is certainly a more legitimate concern. Indeed, there have been many validations from the Kestenbaum study era that were the amalgamation of months from the 1900 census with years from later records (i.e. a 1900 census that says for example May 1895, but a social security application that says 2 Apr 1896 being validated as 2 May 1896 [note: this is a constructed, not real example, but mimics the process I have seen for actual Kestenbaum-validated cases]). I too share the concern that these validations do not make much sense, but the correct place to express these concerns is not on Wikipedia but in the publications of reliable sources. The scientific community accepted the Kestenbaum-study dates; they are the basis of the IDL database entries for American cases, as well as accepted as cases by the GRG (though many of these have been revalidated in recent years with additional documentation located). However, none of this is DUE for inclusion in the articlespace, as none of it is based on reliable sources.

To the extent that alternative dates and years of birth are mentioned in these reliable sources (e.g. Maggie Barnes in the peer-reviewed piece Jeanne Calment and her successors, discussion of Gertrude Weaver's date of birth here or the discrepancy between the Longeviquest-validated and GRG-validated age for Eliza Underwood [see vs ), it can be mentioned on Wikipedia. For example, if we were able to access the detailed report on the case validation of Delphia Welford mentioned by the GRG and it included some discussion of the uncertainty, we could include further discussion. However, we cannot use forum posts by user Futurist, a note added by a FamilySearch user (neither of whom are experts in supercentenarian research) and an unreliable self-published piece by Zak and Gibbs to contest the evaluations made by reliable sources.

The entire point of the WP:RS policy and WP:NOR is the avoid the kind of "well according to this primary document, this is true" and "no actually" we have been engaging in. This is original research, because it involves original analysis of primary sources. I provided a provisional explanation above of why your argument doesn't work, but I will note that this line of argumentation is not going to be productive, as it is precisely against Wikipedia policies and guidelines.

As for the Lucy Hannah case, I will expand upon this. Zak and Gibbs are not the progenitors of the criticism of this case. The case was indeed officially retracted in 2020 with the publication of Age 115+ in the USA: An Update by Robert Young and Waclaw Jan Kroczek . As noted by Young and Kroczek in this chapter, "The GRG backing came from the IDL backing; the IDL backing came from the SSA study backing". The SSA study here is often called Kestenbaum study, which was the basis of this published chapter by Bert Kestenbaum and B. Renee Ferguson . At the point in time this research was being conducted, supercentenarian researchers had to look through census records using soundex cards, rather than the modern search engines from FamilySearch, Ancestry and the like. This analysis was much more rudimentary than the scientific analyses that are required for extreme ages today (from Young & Kroczek The SSA study methodology probably was effective over 97% of the time ... But, as ... skeptics have stated, extraordinary claims to 115+ should get a further look, including an attempt to fit the case within a family-tree reconstitution, or at least a check to see what further documents may be available). There are dozens of threads on the fan forums (which in the past were more of a host to many researchers, alongside fans) expressing concerns with the case and forum user 930310 (who is a published researcher in this field) conducted significant research to identify the likely actual relatives in the 1880 census and why the purported 1880 census match doesn't fit. All of this predates Zak and Gibbs short introduction into the field. Katzrockso (talk) 22:33, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

Coming finally to the long paragraph listing out the information found in each primary source document for her case, the purpose of the short biographies here is not to elaborate upon the intricacies of the validation process for each supercentenarian, but to provide an encyclopedic summarization of what reliable secondary sources have said about this subject. We don't write the intricacies of how biographers of other notable subjects have debated determining particular facts about a person, except to the extent that these intricacies are covered in sources. Here we don't have much reliable sourcing that discusses the primary source documents (census records, social security records, etc), so this is not a "significant viewpoin[t] that [has] been published by reliable sources", nor something that can we can weigh in "in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources". The only source that mentions these documents whatsoever is the brief mention in the GRG validation announcement ; using multiple pieces of evidence and documentation spanning from her early life until 1992 ... Subsequent research provided only more evidence in support of this. This does not provide any reason to include these primary source documents in the article. There are supercentenarians whose census records have been mentioned in news reports or other published validation reports. For example, published validation reports for Jeanne Calment and Lucile Randon include the entirety of the primary source documents as well as detailed commentary on the documents, which is a much stronger case for inclusion. One example of specific records being mentioned in news reports include Mary Griffin Gentry (; Gentry's family provides evidence for her 110 years via a Census Bureau document, circa June 1, 1900, which lists Mary Griffin as a 2-year-old female born in Alabama in September 1897), but there are many others throughout the years (Delma Kollar is another example I found quickly). In the case of Delphia Welford, we do not have any reliable sources that mention or discuss these primary source documents, so they are not WP:DUE for inclusion whatsoever. Katzrockso (talk) 22:45, 31 December 2025 (UTC)