The Wentworths did not die on schedule.
Reuben Wentworth (1729–1826) made it to ninety-six. His wife, Eleanor James, made it to a hundred and two. Between them they witnessed the better part of two centuries and treated mortality as a polite suggestion they were free to decline.
Reuben was born in York County, Maine around 1729 and died 18 May 1826. He was alive for the reign of George II and the presidency of John Quincy Adams — a span that ought to require two separate people.
Ninety-six years. And the American Revolution tried to kill him in the middle of it.
Reuben was at Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775 — which, interestingly enough, was actually fought on Breed’s Hill, because the eighteenth century could not be trusted to name anything correctly.
He was forty-five, twice the age of most of the men in the redoubt. The Americans held through two British charges, but ran out of powder before the third. That turned out not to matter as the Redcoats came over the wall with bayonets.
What followed was less a battle than a foot race, and the race killed more Americans than the defense had.
Reuben walked off it and went home, and declined to die for another half-century.
Sadly, his sons did not inherit it their parents longevity skills.
Reuben and Eleanor had boys, and the boys went to sea — which in coastal Maine in the 1790s was simply what boys did.
In 1794, Reuben Jr. fell from a mast at Wells around 1794 and drowned. In 1797, his brothers Enoch, his twin, John shipped out of Boston and simply did not come back, the ocean keeping its own counsel about the particulars.
Three years and one sea apart. Reuben and Eleanor buried all three, and then did the cruelest thing their constitution was capable of.
They kept living.
Reuben had thirty more years of it. Eleanor outdid him, and was twenty years a widow, outliving most of the family she was responsible for starting.
The talent for not dying, which looks like a gift on paper, has to be something like a death sentence itself. You do not get to be a Wentworth centenarian without also being a Wentworth who attends a century’s worth of funerals.
Sources. The Wentworth Genealogy (1878), no. 263 — Reuben’s marriage to Eleanor James (1768), his parents, and the three sons the sea took. The 1878 genealogy is also the only authority for Reuben at Bunker Hill — he is on no surviving Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Lebanon service roll — which the post says outright.