NewMexiKen has often wondered about life expectancy and the conventional wisdom that it was so low a century or two or more ago that 30 was old-age, etc.
So I looked at my own paternal line. Here’s the approximate age at death of my father and so forth going back eight generations: 83, 90, 70, 44, 72, 75, 62, 88. The average is 73. For the women of the same line beginning with my mother: 48, 90, 84, 90, 50, 69, 68 (and one unknown). The average is 71.
Now, I realize this sample is so small it’s meaningless. But what I am wondering for the umpteenth time is, what was the life expectancy once you were an adult and had survived childhood diseases?
By the way, I read somewhere just this past week that our parents’ longevity is not a good predictor of life expectancy. While we may inherit genetic tendencies toward certain diseases, etc., from our parents, there are too many variables for genetics to predict how long we might live.
You’re right — life expectancy at birth is only the crudest measure of a population’s health. Infectious diseases, farm and industrial accidents, war, childbearing (and these days, car accidents and gunshots) tend to kill mostly young people. That measure keeps being used though, and makes it look like nobody got to get old. You chould probably reconstruct life expectancy at various ages from the census and death statistics.