Life Expectancy–1911 and 2011


Wednesday, August 9, 1911: Today is passing and my opportunity for writing anything about it is passing with it. It is not necessary to jot down the happenings of every occurrence.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Since Grandma didn’t write much a hundred years ago today, I’ll tell you about some statistics I found on the Center for Disease Control website. I’ve often heard that people live longer now than they used to, and I wondered how much longer they lived.

In 1911 the life expectancy at birth for females was 53 years; for males it was 50 years.

Grandma was born in 1895. I don’t have data for people born in 1895, but assume that the life expectancy was even lower then than in 1911. Grandma lived longer than average.  She died in 1981 when she was 85-years-old.

Since more children died shortly after birth a hundred years ago than today, I thought that might affect the birth life expectancies. So I also checked the life expectancy at age 60.In 1911 a 60-year-old female could expect to live 15 more years; a male could expect to live 14 more years. In 2011 a 60-year-old female can expect to live 24 more years and a male can expect to live 21 more years. (For those who care–The 2011 numbers are for the most recent available year. The Center for Disease Control has not yet released the 2011 life expectancy tables, so those estimates may go up or down slightly after they becomes available.)

13 Responses

  1. Fascinating on so many levels. I love Helena’s introspection and your extrapolation of it to life expectancy. The male life expectancy chart at age 60 is curious. What changed in the late 60s to improve the rates? Was it the push to make people aware of the dangers of smoking or was there some medical breakthrough?

    • I’m not sure why the life expectancy at age 60 improved in the 1960s–but your suggestion makes sense to me that maybe it was because people became more aware of the dangers of smoking. I did a quick Google search and increases in life expectancy seem to be generally attributed to public health initiatives, medical breakthroughs, and improved nutrition.

  2. I suspect that the increase in life expectancy after the 1940s is related to the availability of antibiotics.

  3. […] Life Expectancy—1911 and 2011 […]

  4. girls rock ! In my mom in laws senior home there’s one guy…he’s very popular so the guys who make it have that to look forward too LOL

  5. Excellent graphs that I can use when I explain that the US Census’ 72 year privacy rule has nothing to do with life expectancy in my Family History Research class!

  6. Like the earlier commenter, I wanted to add other things that may have had a hand in the life expectancies 100 years ago: the types of work a person does, for one. There were some very dangerous working environments and no safety regulation. I found this out when I worked the graveyard shift in a 100+yr old funeral home in downtown Los Angeles: I would go up to the records room and read the death and funeral records for the early 1900s while on my lunch break. You’d be amazed at the horse and buggy accidents, railcar coupling fatalities, and tramplings…also, the elevator mishaps and misadventures eating poisonous toadstools in the forests near present-day Santa Monica. In 1918, I noticed that the Spanish Influenza seemed to hit 18-30 yr-olds hardest and resulted in large death tolls around the world. Tuberculosis was common here too as everyone came West to the drier climate to convalesce.
    Modern transport and safer working conditions and vaccines keep us from ever realizing the hard lives of 100 years ago, I am certain.

  7. People are living longer…but many after age 80 are not doing that well….

    • Even a hundred years ago, a few people lived to be very elderly. I’ve often wondered about the health of those people in their later years.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s


Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,092 other followers

%d bloggers like this: