Stories in Stone

The Long-Lived

To reach a great age was rarer once, and a long life was a thing the stones thought worth recording. Gathered here are the archive's longest-lived — every one of them ninety-five or more, from a priest who served seventy-five years at the altar to countrymen who each saw their ninety-fifth year. At their head stands Anne Hogan of Rosemount, dead in 1920 at a remarkable 106 — born before Waterloo, and outliving by forty years the family whose stone she had raised. Carved ages on old limestone are not always to be trusted; but true or fondly rounded, each of these names a life measured out across most of a century, and the quiet astonishment of those who outlived nearly everyone they knew.