A long life spent together

By Joseph Marks

Mar. 30, 2008 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) --
Lilly and Marie, the 103-year-old Clifford twins living in a Grafton, N.D., retirement home may have been the second oldest set of twins in the world at the time of Lilly's death last Sunday.

Twinstuff.com, a Web site devoted to twins news and information, which was updated shortly after Lilly's death, lists three sets of twins who are older than the Cliffords. But the Web site notes that two of those sets of twins have not been referenced in news articles or other updates in more than a year, a sign that one twin may have passed away without public notice.

Twinstuff.com moderator Craig Sanders said he gets twins updates from media searches and from a number of people with expertise in twin issues, including several that focus on centenarian twins.

Obviously, it's possible that some elderly twins have escaped the site's notice, especially if they live in underdeveloped areas outside the reach of Internet media. The vast majority of the elderly twins listed on the Web site are from developed areas, such as the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Currently, the oldest living twins tracked by the Web site are Allan Ceascear and his brother, Allen Charles Jackson, originally from St. Thomas in the Bahamas.

The 104-year-old twins were born Nov. 24, 1903, and are the only male twins to hold the oldest twins title since 105-year-olds Glen and Dale Moyer held the title for 16 months beginning in January 2000 and lasting until Glen's death in April 2001.

The oldest twins ever recorded, the site reports, were Kin Narita and Gin Kanie, born in 1892 in Nagoya, Japan. The twins were 107 years old when Kin died in 2000. Gin lived to celebrate her 108th birthday, according to the site, then died six months later.

The longevity record for one member of a twin set goes to Mary Belle Crombie, born with her sister, Mabel Jean, in 1890 in Calhoun, Ill. Mary Jean died at age 94 in 1984, but Mary Belle lived 19 more years, dying in 2003 at age 113, according to the site. Mary Belle likely was the fourth oldest person in the U.S. at the time of her death and the ninth oldest person in the world.

It was almost inevitable that Sanders would create the twinstuff.com Web site, he said in an e-mail exchange this week.

Sanders and his identical twin, Mark, ran a Web development company, Twin Spin Design, in the late '90s, while living in Texas, and one of their clients was the Houston Astros baseball team. While traveling with the team in Pittsburgh, the Sanders detoured to attend a twins convention in Twinsburg, Ohio, near Cleveland, Sanders wrote.

At the convention, they met identical female twins, Diane and Darlene, both avowed St. Louis Cardinals fans.

"One thing led to another, and I eventually married Diane and my brother married.??.?.Darlene," Sanders wrote. "While we were each dating our future wives, we were developing the twins Web site and launched it later that year."

And yes, Craig and Diane now have identical twin sons, Colby and Brady, soon to turn 7.

Twinstuff.com now boasts 28,000 registered members and 12,000 daily visitors, Sanders wrote, though it's not a full-time job and he only devotes a few hours each day to it.

"I grew up an identical twin, eventually married an identical twin and became dad to identical twins," Sanders wrote, "so I guess I had no choice in the subject."

Reach Marks at (701) 780-1105; (800) 477-6572, ext. 105; or send

e-mail to jmarks@gfherald.com.

Newstex ID: KRTB-0074-24121955