Ann Howard lies buried in the George Howard Cemetery on British Cemetery Road. Her tombstone, on the left-hand side of the cemetery, is clearly visible from the road, and has been the subject of curiosity for many years. Ann Howard’s marker reads:

In Memory of
Ann Howard
Wife of George Howard
Born ____1724
Died November 24, 1841
Aged 117 Years

Lo! the prisoner is released,
Lightened of her fleshly load.
Where the weary are at rest
She is gathered unto God

Did Ann Howard really live to be 117 years old?

As Carl Goerch writes in his 1956 book, Ocracoke, if accurate, Ann Howard “must have been the oldest person ever to have lived in North Carolina.”

Age 117 years is an extraordinary claim, and we may justly wonder if the year of Ann’s birth, 1724, is correct. We know that record keeping in colonial America, especially on Ocracoke Island, was not reliably accurate. Literacy was rare and writing instruments were costly and often unavailable. Ann Howard’s birth month and day are conspicuously not recorded.

According to a professional genealogist, it was highly unlikely for someone in the 1700s to live to be one hundred years old. “There is a frequent pattern we see in the 1800s and prior – once a person reaches about age 50, ages start to be exaggerated. Somehow, they manage to age MORE than 10 years between each census. …[B]ack in those days, age was status. To be the oldest person in your town or county was valued and respected. When you couple that with poor record keeping (and often illiteracy), it’s not surprising things got exaggerated.” *

Ann’s husband George, according to his marker, was born in 1749, 25 years after Ann. It is, of course, possible that Ann was 25 years older than George, but that would be rather curious and extremely unlikely.

Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that the stonecutter was instructed to include the notation “Aged 117 years” to alert future generations that the dates (1724-1841) were not an error. Clearly, Ann Howard’s surviving descendants believed her to be 117 years old, although there was some disagreement even in the mid-1800s. A November 6, 1841, notice in the Tarboro Press stated that “Mrs. Ann Howard died a few days past on Ocracoke at age 115.”

An earlier petition by William Howard (1776-1851), son of George and Ann Howard, to the Court of Pleas & Quarter Sessions, September Term 1835, states that William’s mother, Ann, “is now one hundred, and eight years of age, a lunatic, and so feeble and impaired both in mind and body, as to be incapable of taking care of herself, or property.” If Ann Howard was 108 years old in 1835, she would have been 114 years old at her death in 1841.

Noteworthy is that the George Howard family genealogy indicates that Ann and George’s last child, Mary Elizabeth, was born in 1785, when George was 36 years old. If Ann was born in 1724, she would have been 61 years old when Mary Elizabeth was born, a highly implausible case. Studies of historical populations, including some from colonial America, suggest that the average age for women to have their last child was in their late 30s or early 40s.

So, at the time of her death, was Ann Howard 117, 115, or 114 years old…or maybe significantly younger, perhaps in her 90s? If Ann were born in 1744, not 1724, she would have been just five years older than her husband, forty-one years old when Mary Elizabeth was born, and ninety-seven years old when she died. This is much more likely. We will probably never know exactly how old Ann Howard was, but one thing is certain — her family thought she was very old!