{"id":446444,"date":"2010-03-19T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.usa.gov\/roller\/govgab\/entry\/life_100_years_ago_my"},"modified":"2010-03-18T20:13:28","modified_gmt":"2010-03-19T00:13:28","slug":"life-100-years-ago-my-centenarian-cousin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/446444","title":{"rendered":"Life 100 Years Ago: My Centenarian Cousin"},"content":{"rendered":"

"Who would want to be 100 years old?" "Anyone who is 99," goes the joke.<\/p>\n

I can’t tell you how happy I’ll be in a few weeks. My family and I will gather in Chicago to celebrate my second cousin’s 100th birthday. Hattie is going strong\u2014doesn’t take any medication and can still belt out a hymn like nobody’s business.<\/p>\n

According to the U.S. Census Bureau<\/a>, my centenarian cousin is in good company. It estimates that there were nearly 105,000 centenarians in the U.S. last fall. That’s more than double the number nearly 10 years ago. In 40 years, the number of 100 year olds in the U.S. is projected to jump to 601,000. The Census Bureau also reports<\/a> that about 80 percent of centenarians are women.\"1910<\/p>\n

To put my cousin\u2019s age in perspective, the year she was born, William Howard Taft<\/a> was president, the fashion of the day was Late Edwardian, and cars cost $850<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Supreme Court<\/a> ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson,<\/em> upheld<\/a> the Jim Crow law of "separate but equal" just 14 years before Hattie (an African American woman) was born, and the Lincoln penny was issued<\/a> the year before she was born.<\/p>\n

My cousin was two years old when the Titanic sank<\/a>, and four years old when World War I<\/a> broke out. <\/p>\n

There was no federal income tax<\/a> or Social Security<\/a>, and women couldn\u2019t vote yet<\/a>. There also was no Federal Reserve<\/a> or National Park Service<\/a>, and New Mexico and Arizona (and Alaska and Hawaii) weren\u2019t states yet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For fun, I checked the Social Security Administration<\/a> to see how popular her name<\/a> was 100 years ago ("Hattie" ranked 73rd), and to see how the popularity of her name changed over time (it fell off of the top 1,000 names list 41 years ago). I also requested a birthday greeting<\/a> for her from the President.<\/p>\n

Do you know any centenarians? What was going on the year you were born?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

"Who would want to be 100 years old?" "Anyone who is 99," goes the joke. I can’t tell you how happy I’ll be in a few weeks. My family and I will gather in Chicago to celebrate my second cousin’s 100th birthday. Hattie is going strong\u2014doesn’t take any medication and can still belt out a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}