What the Dickens?

Question

I was just looking at the profiles of Charles Dickens and his father. The details of Charles's life are well documented but his father, John Dickens, was born in 1785, supposedly to a 69 year-old (who also died that year) and a mother Elizabeth (nee Ball) whose profile is otherwise empty. Can anyone beef up these profiles?

Comments

Did not find an answer to your question but ran across an interesting bio.

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/dickensbio1.html

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I see there's plenty of info on geni and by the law of averages some of it is probably correct but I'm extremely suspicious of 69 year-olds fathering children - and dying shortly thereafter. It's possible the wrong William Dickens has been identified at some distant point in the past.

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Actor Charlie Chaplin is said to have fathered a child when Charlie was 73. Anthony Quinn is supposed to have done the same thing at an older age.