10 Age-heaping ratios are not available for Virginia. But in 1776, a census of exact ages was taken in Prince George’s County, Maryland, on the north bank of the Potomac River, and culturally similar to Virginia. The pattern of age heaping was as follows, in comparison with data for early New England and the modern United States (1950):

Image

Age

Prince George s Co., Md. (1776)

New Haven, Conn. (1787)

United States (1950)

29-31

.60

n.a.

.94

39-41

1.46

.87

.93

49-51

1.47

1.58

.93

59-61

2.99

1.72

.92

69-71

n.a.

n.a.

.91

These ratios measure the relative strength and direction of bias in age reporting. Where no net bias exists, the ratio is 1.0. Where a youth bias exists, the age-heaping ratio falls below 1.0; a bias toward older ages causes the ratio to rise above 1.0. For further discussion, see D. H. Fischer, Growing Old in America (rev. ed., New York, 1978), 82-86; sources of New England data appear in part I, above; Maryland data are from John Modell, unpublished compilation from Gaius Marcus Brumbaugh, Maryland Records (2 vols., Baltimore, 1915, 1967), 1-89; data for the United States in 1950 are from Ansley J. Coale and Melvin Zelnik, New Estimates of Fertility and Population in the United States (Princeton, 1963), 90-138.

11 Smith, Inside the Big House, 124.