Meet the people born in the 1800s interviewed in this video

Claim:

The video faithfully shows interviews with people born in the 1800s.

evaluation:

context

This video was colored from a clip recorded in 1929.

In June 2026, a Snopes reader asked if a 14-minute YouTube video actually showed interviews with people born in the 1800s. A reader emailed: “Is this a fake AI-generated video? If so, that’s really disgusting because it’s pretending to be real colored history.”

The video, released May 23 and viewed more than 1 million times, was titled “Interviews with people born in the 1800s! Filmed in 1929, restored in color.” It featured eight separate historical clips, all reportedly recorded in the United States.

Part of the description reads as follows:

Rare interviews with centenarian Americans who share first-hand memories of the 1800s and early 1900s. These are the true voices of another era, preserving the stories of frontier life, horse-drawn towns, war, hardship, family traditions, and a rapidly changing America.

Many were already elderly by 1929 and could now glimpse a world lost to history. All interviews will be restored and preserved to keep these memories alive for future generations.

This video faithfully presents authentic interviews with people born in the 19th century. Therefore, we rated this claim as true.

A visible watermark reading “MIRC @ SC EDU” identifies the clip as colorized from a black and white Fox Movietone original courtesy of the University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collection. The video on the university’s website shows raw footage with multiple takes (labeled “outtakes”) and is longer than the clip shown on the YouTube video. The article below links to each of the eight original clips.

However, that YouTube video contained one piece of content that was not authentic. The user appears to have used the Google Gemini artificial intelligence platform to generate a non-authentic thumbnail image that shows a high-quality, colorized view of two men. The SynthID Detector test, a scan that purports to tell if an image or video was created or edited by Google’s AI tools, returned the following response: “This image contains a watermark indicating that most or all of it was edited or generated using Google AI.”

Maine’s Quarter Century Club

The first clip of the YouTube video features older men and women gathering at a meeting of the Quarter Century Club in Maine. The incident occurred on August 26, 1929 at what a Lewiston newspaper described as the “State Fairgrounds.”

One man asked another man, “Hey, what can I tell you? He wants me to talk to him,” referring to the people operating the cameras and audio equipment. One newspaper published a photo of the same two men, aged 80 and 82, with a caption that read in part: “Even the photographer can’t help but laugh at the smart cracks these guys are doing.”

Later in the clip, the women can be seen chatting while knitting, including one talking about the man who crashed his car into a utility pole.

Florida octogenarians, Civil War veterans

The second clip was originally a newsreel titled “Florida sunshine cheers up old men. Octogenarians dance and talk about the Civil War at Lake Worth.”

The video begins with Elizabeth T. Boyer, 84, announcing the creation of Florida’s first octogenarian club. Participants dance and clap to the music. Two Civil War veterans talk about the battle that included the death of a Union brigadier general. General Nathaniel Ryan.

An article in the Palm Beach Post chronicling the 50 participants attending a meeting at the First Methodist Church in Lake Worth on February 21, 1929, referred in part to those filming the event, noting that “movie photographers surprised the old men and insisted they perform a square dance.”

Lydia Steward’s 100th birthday

Lydia Steward of Redlands, California, celebrated her 100th birthday in the third clip of her YouTube video. In another take, she greets people who appear to be family members and dances a waltz. In one take, she says, “Today is the happiest day of my life. The first 100 years were the hardest, but I take solace in the fact that I wish I had lived in California. I don’t understand beliefs in other climates.”

A newspaper article detailed the shooting, saying, “Grandma Lydia Stewart, who lived in California for 76 years, celebrated her 100th birthday last week by waltzing with her son-in-law, Redlands Park Superintendent W.T. Ferguson, as movie cameras recorded her every move for millions of theatergoers to see.”

Steward was born on October 1, 1829, and died on Christmas Day, 1931. The article and a photo of her grave confirm that her last name is spelled Steward, not “Stewart.” Her tombstone has the inscription “102 years old”.

Theater producer Daniel Frohman

In the fourth clip, New York theater producer Daniel Frohman says, “Broadway is the most remarkable and picturesque street in the world. I’ve known Broadway for over 50 years.” He continues:

I was a young man employed in the office of a new illustrated evening paper. That was moving. Photos of the day’s events were printed at least two days after the events occurred. Nowadays, the news is sometimes published in illustrated newspapers the day before it is published.

Mr. Frohman goes on to discuss the establishment of many theaters in New York City and the importance of newsreel theaters. “Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you can hear me and see me again.”

He fell in his hotel suite, broke his right hip, developed bronchial pneumonia, and died on December 26, 1940, at the age of 83.

Galusha Cole, 103 years old

In the fifth clip, 103-year-old Galusha Cole of Pasadena, California, is seen answering questions about her life and cutting a pyramid-shaped birthday cake. The crew photographed the scene on August 19, 1929.

The man asking the question, identified on the Moving Image Research Collections website as 73-year-old CR Hodges, asks Cole: Cole responds, “I want people to be honest with each other and eliminate bad habits if they exist.” Speaking of bad habits, Cole says he didn’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes.

Born in 1826, Cole died on April 11, 1931, at the age of 104, from pneumonia caused by a fractured left hip.

A day in the life of a US senator

The only video of the eight clips that Moving Image Research Collections shared on YouTube shows Rebecca Felton, the first female U.S. senator, sitting on the front steps of her plantation home in Georgia. Mr. Felton was appointed by the governor and served in the Senate for just 22 hours to fill a short-term vacancy.

In the clip, Felton greets viewers and talks about his time in Washington, D.C. And she said: “There’s a plane, uh, over my house and it’s heading towards me, and even though it’s supposed to happen often, Grandma won’t go outside to see if she can see it.”

The New Georgia Encyclopedia described Felton as “one of the leading defenders of women’s rights in the South and one of the most outspoken supporters of lynching.” She caught a cold in Atlanta on January 26, 1930, developed bronchopneumonia, and died at the age of 94. (The second video without audio shows Felton in 1927.)

John R. Voorhis of Tammany

On July 24, 1929, a crew filmed 99-year-old John R. Voorhis talking about his long life in New York City. The crew captured the Tammany Hall leader, born July 27, 1829, three days shy of his 100th birthday. He says of his childhood:

New York City has changed greatly in its appearance since then. At that time, the buildings were much shorter than they are now. Now there are gigantic buildings there, fifteen to twenty stories high, filled with people who transact all sorts of business, and who appear to be successful in them.

Mr. Voorhis, who newspapers called “the Grand Sachem of the influential Tammany Society,” died on February 5, 1932, at the age of 102. When he turned 102, he told reporters, “I said my last birthday would be my last. I’ve had too many birthdays.”

railroad engineer John M. Reilly

The eighth and final clip begins with a train arriving at a station in White Plains, New York, on November 30, 1929. The film crew interviews a 70-year-old retired engineer named John M. Reilly.

Passengers greeted Riley, who told the camera that he was born on November 16, 1859, in Valley Falls, Rhode Island. He announced his last drive as an engineer, and the video ended with the train roaring away.

The Find a Grave website identifies a man named John Reilly, born in the same year and town, as having died in 1937.

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