I recently uncovered a secret.  People tell small “white lies” about their age all the time these days, usually when they are trying to make a good first impression.  While individuals may prevaricate to strangers, rarely would they lie about their age to their entire family.  However, this is exactly what my grandmother did, and she didn’t exactly confess to the truth during her lifetime, either.

Recently, my mom and I spent a night looking up our relatives on a website called “Ancestry.com.”  The site allows you to look up birth and death certificates, census reports, and immigration records of your ancestors.  My mom decided to look up her mother, Rose, on one of the old census reports, and she found something that was truly shocking.

It is recorded on my grandmother’s census record that she was born in 1907; however, she had led her entire family to believe that she had been born in 1912.  Now this struck me as impossible that she could have pulled off lying about a full five years all of her life. She would have been clearly much older and more intelligent than the other children in her grade school, making her real age obvious.  However, my mother believes that Rose had not started lying about her age until she met her husband, Al.

When my grandparents met in 1938, Al was 28 years old and Rose was 31.  At that time, it was untraditional for a woman in her 30s to be single.  The common term for a single woman in her 30s was a “spinster,” or someone who would most likely not marry during her lifetime.  Also, at that time, it was somewhat rare that a woman was older than her boyfriend or husband.  Because Rose had been older than Al when they met, she lied and said that she was actually 26, obviously making her younger than her boyfriend Al.  This, of course, was more socially appropriate and acceptable at that time.

I wonder if in today’s society, women still feel the need to lie about their age.  I personally would never lie about my age, no matter what the circumstances. In today’s society, women are respected a lot more than they used to be in the 1930s.  Many women are great leaders and hold very high positions in our government and workplace.  Because of this improvement of women’s roles in America, women feel less need to lie about something like their age.  Women have proven themselves as more important in our society that was previously dominated by the male population. Therefore age, more than ever, is nothing but a number today.  It’s too bad that my grandmother, Rose, lived in a time that she felt she had to hide the truth.