I'd like to introduce another possibility here. It is of critical
importance (and also sometimes extremely difficult) to ascertain for
certain that the appearance of a name in records several decades apart
refer to the same person or to two people of the same name. While I
don't doubt that a woman 50 years old back then could have had a child,
it strikes me as more likely that the records might refer to two women
of the same name but different ages.
 
I don't know how many times I've begun with a question that had red
flags attached to it (a woman said to have given birth then at age 50 I
regard as a red flag) and found that I or some other body had conflated
references to two or more people.
 
Research has made me much more cautious and less credulous.
 
$0.02 worth from
 
Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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