John Trittenbach -- my 4th great grandfather -- was born about 1783 somewhere near Easton. In 1810, he married Catharine Barnett, and spent the next few decades producing children who would vex future genealogists like me. Based on the censuses from 1820 to 1840, it looks like John and Catharine had nine or ten children, of which I've identified six...all girls. More than any other family in my tree, the Trittenbachs have stymied efforts to pin down their birth dates.
Take, for example, daughter Amanda (married William Mock). I have identified her in the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, which respectively imply birth years of 1824, 1820, 1811, and 1808. This has the somewhat dubious effect of making her 18 months older every birthday. Her church burial record indicates that she was born in 1812. What's a researcher to do? Until a solution appears, I've simply been averaging these numbers to 1815.
A bigger question is why we have this vast range of dates for Amanda's birth. As I understand it, birthdays generally weren't carefully tracked until the latter half of the 19th century. But it's a completely different matter to believe that you are aging 50% faster than everyone else around you. One conceivable theory is that vanity led Amanda to fudge her age a bit, but that she cared less the older she got. Or maybe she just liked lying to census takers. I may never know.
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