Is This a Record?

What is the upper age limit for becoming a parent? For men, the question is largely academic, because it is virtually impossible to be sure of a child's paternity, and most stories of centenarians whose wives produce children deserve nothing more than the knowing smiles they usually elicit. "Maternity," however, says Dr. Harvey Flack, editor of Britain's Family Doctor, "is an indisputable fact, usually witnessed by at least two people . . . And then the blessed event is solemnly recorded by the local registrar."

Dr. Flack kept getting reports of women over 50 who had had babies, and many readers kept asking, "Is this a record?" To answer them, Dr. Flack did a great deal of digging, and eventually he settled on the case of Hilda Gosney, who was born April 19, 1906, at Knottingley in Yorkshire, when her mother (as attested by the birth certificate on file at Somerset House in London) was 53 years, 7 months and 12 days old. Nobody seems to have bothered to ask Mr. Gosney's first name, but it is recorded that he was 75 at the time. And the record-breaking mother lived to be almost 94. The child, now Mrs. Edward Smith, had her own last child at age 38. If anyone can break Mother Gosney's record, Editor Flack will pay 25 guineas ($73.50) for documented proof.

A U.S. claim to have broken the British record might be based on the 1949 birth of a boy in Helena, Ark., to Mrs. Fred Turley, who believed she was 59. But Mrs. Turley, born in France, could never prove her date of birth.

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