Family Searcher: Calendar confusion

14 years ago
FAMILY SEARCHER
by Nina Brawn

Working in genealogy, is to work through centuries of time. The longer you investigate the past, the more the edges of time blur, so that it is easy to get confused about ”when” your event occurred. For most of the 18th and 19th centuries it became increasingly common to abbreviate the year to the decade. Ten years ago, if I found a date of ’98, I was pretty sure it referred to 1898. But now that we have advanced into the 2000s, it could just as easily mean 1998. That’s a big difference!

Until I got involved in genealogy I had never thought much about the date-writing format we commonly use. Of course, I knew that the people who lived in 14 B.C. never called it that, but I wasn’t looking that far back in time so it didn’t matter. More recently, there has been an effort to “de-christianize” A.D and B.C. I still get confused referring to dates in the 1600s as the “seventeenth century” and I usually have to flip to our current 21st century to remember whether to jump forward or backward to understand what years we are talking about. But doing genealogy in the mid-18th century (the 1750s) I suddenly started seeing double – literally. I was finding vital records dated “1753/4”, or “1753 old”. Huh?

For the first 15 centuries A.D, Europe had run on what we now call the “Julian Calendar”, but because of the length of our solar day, every 400 years we were coming up short. This was throwing off the timing of Easter, so Pope Gregory XIII devised a new calendar, which included “leap” years, and caught us up the 10 days we had lost over 15 centuries, so the day after March 4th, 1582 became March 15th, 1582. His other critical change was to start the new years on January 1st, rather than March 1st.

As you can imagine, the world was reluctant to accept this change, with England (and therefore, America) being one of the last to officially change, and then, not until the mid 1700s when there was another “missing” day. Some people accepted the change immediately, and some not even after it was official. The result is, you may find dates such as 5/16 April 1704 meaning “April 5th on the Julian Calendar or April 16th on the Gregorian Calendar we use today”. In the 1750s we accepted the change in when the new year began, so for the first three months of a year, you may find double year dates such as 1753/4 or 1753 OLD meaning using the “Julian” calendar rather than the “new” one from 1582!

You will quickly find as you begin organizing your research that correct dates are crucial to your work. More important than writing your date the “right” way (whatever that is) is to be consistent in writing dates the “same” way for all your work. But for now, I have not only run out of time, but out of space as well, so I will devote the next column to how to keep your own work comprehensible with the passage of time.

Editor’s note: This regular column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society. The group meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501. Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com.