Letters From The Time Traveler: The Clever Old Woman Who Discovered My Secret

Dearest,

There is only one other person who I knew very briefly in the mid-1800s who can relate to me.

Her name was Margaret Ann Neve and she was born in 1792, nine years after the revolution. Her death in 1903 made her the first proven person to live in three centuries.

She was born in Guernsey, an island in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy. When she was a child, Mrs. Neve fell into a 3-day coma. She had fallen off a banister and hit her head.

After that, she strangely never got sick again until the age of 105 when she caught the flu.

She was able to remember moments about the French Revolution (1789–1799) and her father commanding a militia on the island. She would also visit the battlefield of Waterloo, shortly after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815.

In 1823, she married and settled in Kent, England where she lived for the next 25 years, childless. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Neve went back to Guernsey to live with her mother.

So what was her secret to such a very long life? According to an article from the Richmond Examiner in 1901, Mrs. Neve drank a glass and a half of sherry during lunchtime and drank whiskey and water at dinnertime.