Great article but the oldest guy in the UK definitely isn’t from one of the roughest parts of Liverpool, he’s had a nice life living by the seaside in a place called Southport 25km away, and doesn’t seem like a liar.
My hometown - a very quiet place, especially in the winter with no tourists - but it seems he did grow up and spend most of his life in Liverpool which was/is a rough place
The "oldest man in the UK" referred to is probably John Tinniswood, who now lives in an old-age home in Southport, but was born somewhere outside of that old-age home and lived out there in the world for most of his life. These sources are quite firm on "Liverpool," although I don't see anyone directly saying what part of Liverpool.
The hypothesis Newman is implicitly presenting in TFA is that Tinniswood is indeed very old, but — instead of being born in 1912, married at age 30, and now age 112 — perhaps he was really born in 1917, married at 25, and now 107. Or any other massaging of the numbers. Really the only way to distinguish among these hypotheses is to have some sort of documentary evidence — birth certificate, marriage certificate, employment records, etc.
Newman's point is that "supercentenarian" populations are disproportionately correlated with bad recordkeeping (presumably even when you control for the observation that century-old records are likely worse-kept than newer records, although I don't think Newman directly says that). And also with pension fraud. He writes: ( https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3.full )
> The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. [...] In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age [...] supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five [...] relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
Now, maybe there's no evidence that John Tinniswood is lying about his age (consciously or unknowingly), and maybe "the rough parts of Liverpool" have great recordkeeping, and maybe Tinniswood isn't even from the roughest part of Liverpool — sure, I think Newman's argument is specifically weak on concrete evidence for any of those claims, which means Tinniswood might be a terrible individual example for him to have picked. But then you should object to those claims. Don't jump all the way to an obviously false response like "Tinniswood isn't even from Liverpool!"
> The hypothesis Newman is implicitly presenting in TFA is that Tinniswood is indeed very old,
I'm curious why the census isn't presented as evidence of location. UK census are very informative and the 1921 census is the most recent one available.
I'll note that a very small percentage of individuals aren't found (illegible, record loss, issue at taking) but it's exceptional.
From there I'd see where his parents were in the 1911 census. If it's the same location, odds are high that's where he was born.
Exceptions are possible. To help rule them out, I'd research and build-out the extended family. In that day, siblings/cousins banded together; local migration shows up when viewing the lateral family.
Is it not possible that there really was a John Alfred Tinniswood living in 1921 but the man who now claims to be him in 2024 is actually someone else who stole the original's identity when he died unrecorded?
