Most of these clips were made around 1930, which means that a lot of the interviewees were born in the 1840s. Some earlier. I’ve located a number of these videos on YouTube, and rather than post them all at once (some are long) I’m planning to post excerpts now and then as a regular feature.

I find them astounding. Not only do these interviews drive home how long we’ve had the capacity to make movies and record people’s speech, but they make it apparent that, by interviewing the elderly, one can see back farther in time to make the even more distant past come alive in a way that’s startling.

I’ve also been struck over and over by how vigorous these elderly people are. But that makes perfect sense, because they had to be much hardier than people of the same age today. These old folks didn’t have the benefit of antibiotics and all sorts of modern medical interventions to help them along. They had to have remarkable resistance for all sorts of diseases, and they also ordinarily were very physically active by necessity. The number of old people was fewer as a percentage of the population, but the ones that survived were a very special group.

As you will see here.

Note also the old-fashioned accents (some of their lines seem scripted, though), Love this first guy in particular, who has an almost Frostian eloquence at times:

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