Americans named Moore die two and a half years before the national norm

In any small-town funeral home, the name Moore needs no introduction. It fills guest books from Appalachia to the Gulf Coast, carved into headstones that span centuries of American life. Yet across 119 Moore obituaries recorded in the past year, the average age at death lands at 73.9 — a full 2.5 years short of the CDC's national life expectancy of 76.4. That gap is modest in isolation, but persistent enough to register as more than noise. For a surname carried by hundreds of thousands of American families, a shortfall of that size touches an enormous number of households, each one absorbing the weight of a life ended a little sooner than the actuarial tables predicted. The median tells a slightly different story — 76, closer to the national benchmark — which hints that younger deaths in the dataset are pulling the average down. What lives, and what losses, hide in that statistical tug-of-war?