Ana María Vela Rubio

Ana María Vela Rubio - 116 years, 47 days, Spain
Ana Vela Rubio was born in Puente Genil, Spain in 1901. She died in 2017 at the age of 116 having lived her whole life in the same country. A comprehensive validation report was published by Gómez-Redondo and Domènech in 2020 which they claim as an in-depth verification going beyond the basic standard required by GWR, GRG and IDL [52].

Spain preserves good birth, marriage and death records, both civil and church from this time, but they are not yet easy to access online so we were unable to find many records of our own except a few census results on Filae.com.

The validation provides both civil birth certificates and church baptism records for Ana. The validators met her in late life. She was not capable of testifying in person but her children and grandchildren filled in the gaps. Ana did not marry so the only mid-life documents are ID cards for Ana and her children. We are not given dates for these. The validators did not report finding birth records for Ana’s children in their report. The family were however able to provide photographs and detailed testimony of her movements.

Ana had three younger sisters and three brothers. Two sisters and two brothers died as infants. It can be assumed that an early sibling switch would have been too easily noticed since they followed the routine of religious confirmation. Ana was assigned as godparent to her two surviving siblings, but does not seem to have been able to fulfil her religious obligations to care for them when her parents were no longer able. This was due to her own circumstances which required her to find work where there were better opportunities.

At a young age Ana left her parental family to live in the coastal town of Malaga 100km south of her birth place. She worked as a seamstress and had children as a mistress of Antonio Padrón Valderrama, a 20 year old married man. There could have been some disapproval from Ana’s father and siblings, leading to estrangement from her parental family. The couple had four children and lived at Calle Cuarteles 32 in Malaga according to the validation. However, the archive in Malaga informed us that neither Vela Rubio nor Valderrama were recorded in censuses at this address. Her daughter Ana and son Juan lived to old age and were able to provide family testimony. The eldest son Antonio also lived to age 82 but had died before the validators were able to contact him.

It is hard to firmly rule out the possibility that someone else took the identity of Ana when she moved away from home to Malaga, and before she started to have children. There is little to show that she had any contact with her parental family after leaving home and we don’t know when she lost contact with her parents or other relatives. Her first son is said to have been born in 1923 but the validators have not confirmed that this is backed by a birth certificate. If it is correct, then in the circumstances of an identity switch before his birth, only a few years could have been gained. Relative probability would therefore tend to weigh against it.

The family used a system of dual surnames that was required in Spain at the time. The first surname is a patronym passed on from father to children in the usual way, Vela in this case. Her second surname Rubio is taken from the mother and would normally be discarded for the next generation. Ana did not marry the father of her children, so they bore the same double surname Vela Rubio as their mother. The use of this system is helpful to the validation because it means that there were unlikely to be cousins or other close relatives with the same name whose birth details could be confused.

The validators ruled out switches with same-named children but did not explicitly consider other sibling switches. The final fate of Ana’s younger sister Carmen is unknown but a note added to her baptism record indicates that she had her religious confirmation while possibly passing her adolescence in orphanages with her brother away from home. We found census returns from 1921 to 1924 showing the two children living in Cordoba, 75km to the North of Puente Genil. Their father lived until 1965 but was blind so he may not have been able to look after the children after their mother died. Ana’s children had few recollections of their surviving aunt and uncle except for an anecdotal story that the uncle Juan drowned in the river as an adult. Later the family moved even further away from their natal home to Barcelona. The validators do not report on whether Ana’s children knew their maternal grandfather. It would help further to rule out an identity switch after Ana left home if they were known to be later reunited.

Opportunities for an identity switch between Ana and her sister Carmen who was ten years younger are probably very limited because the first son of Ana was reported to be born when Carmen was 12 years old, and she continued to expand her family for ten years. Ana’s daughter, also named Ana was close to her mother all her life except for a period when she worked in England as a nurse after WW2. She and her brothers would have been aware of any later switch, so an implausible family conspiracy would be required. The same argument does not help with the possibility of earlier switches involving other individuals.

In summary, despite difficult circumstances, the birth records and family testimony combine to form a reasonably sound validation. The main weakness is the possibility of an identity switch with a stranger or cousin when Ana left her parental family and became estranged. It would be helpful if the validators could provide some testimony from her descendants to confirm that there was some contact with the original family to rule out this option. We contacted the validators who confirmed that they had obtained birth certificates for some of Ana’s children, but they did not answer our follow-up questions. Some further mid-life records could help with later time periods. Assuming this could be resolved, the validation is of a relatively high standard and the longevity claim can be accepted for most scientific use cases.