It is rare for the ages of an individual to be completely consistent across all the records in which they are listed. Generally speaking, age discrepancies of a few years are not really cause for concern if the other details are consistent. As a rule of thumb, the younger a person is the more consistent their ages should be and that consistency lessons as a person ages.
Records are never entirely consistent, but if you think that two people apparently born ten years apart are in fact the same person, you better have solid grounds for that belief.
These are all good points, especially the one about younger ages being more reliable. For me, US census-given ages are thoroughly unreliable. I have a great grand aunt, for example, who on several census forms gave ages that put her birth somewhere between 1840 and 1850. (I split that difference for my tree and made her birth 1845.) I've also seen cases where on a census a woman gives a birth year making her almost 60, and then adds that she gave birth the year previous!
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