Editor's Note: This article is the first in a two-part series. Read Part II.

Names, dates, places—the basic building blocks of genealogy. So basic, in fact, that we don't think much about them. We should. This article and several to follow will take a closer look at these building blocks. We'll begin with dates.

Recording Dates
How should we write a date (or enter it in our computer)? It's a simple thing, right? Perhaps not.

One of the first lessons I learned in my beginning genealogy class was to write out the month and give the full year. My teacher explained that writing "7/9/11" is a bad idea. Is it July or September? And which century? When I designed my first computer genealogy database back in the early 1980s, I carefully left two spaces for the date, three for the month, and four for the year. The fields were free-form, so I wasn't as restricted as some of the early commercial databases, which expected one of twelve predefined codes for months. But it wasn't long before I began running into problems.

As my genealogical research experience grew, I came to realize that any predefined assumption about dates could present a problem; there must be no restrictions on the date field (an awkward position for a systems analyst to take). Why? Because our ancestors and their world didn't have computer consistency, nor do we. For instance, I told Juliana I would work on this article "next weekend," and it would be done by "Monday the 14th." I just made a commitment for "next Tuesday at noon." The local genealogical society meets on the third Monday of the month. And so on.

How should you record the date? The safest and best method is to enter it exactly as written. You can add your interpretation of the date, expressing it in traditional format. The proper way to do this is to put your interpretation in square brackets [ ]. Square brackets have universal meaning as an addition by the editor (you). Do not use parentheses, which have other uses and might even appear in the original document.

We should always retain the original version in our own files; thus there can be no misunderstanding in the future. I have family group sheets from several researchers on an early Quaker family. Due to Quaker dating and the calendar change, researchers had converted, unconverted, reconverted, and adjusted the dates they found on other group sheets (several times), leaving both the months and years in substantial disagreement. I couldn't even guess at which sheet if any contained the original dates, and I had to search for original documents to help resolve the discrepancies.

Interpreting Dates
As we work our way backward in researching our ancestry, we are likely to encounter date variations, such as the following common Anglo-American examples:

• 10th September last; 12th instant
  
• In the 5th year of George II; in the 14th year of our Independence
  
• Easter Monday; the day after Christmas; Michaelmas
  
• First month
  
• 1712/3
  
• OS; NS; Old Style; New Style
  
• 7ber 7th day

"Last" and "Instant." These terms seem to appear most frequently in newspapers, and occasionally in financial records such as mortgages. "Last Thursday" is pretty clear (assuming we know when "now" is), but what about "10th last?" It isn't as difficult as it seems. "Last" means previous; in this example the day is given, but the month is lacking, so "last" means last month. "Instant" means "this." I'm not sure why, but "next" doesn't occur much in records.

Regnal Years. In times past, people seemed to evaluate "when" an event occurred more often in relationship to other events, rather than an absolute calendar. In England and the American colonies, deeds often have dates such as "the 5th year of George II." Later we see the same type of terminology, but in reference to our own independence. I noted in one set of New England town meeting records that the last record in which the year was stated as "in the fifteenth year of his magesties reign" was on 28 February 1775. No matter what our history books tell us, I think we can see the town's subtle declaration of independence in the spring of 1775.

If the "real" year for a regnal date isn't given in a document, I find the table in the back of Black's Law Dictionary (at your local library) most helpful.

Church Calendar. Many of the dates in which we are most interested—the dates of baptisms, marriages, and burials—were recorded in churches. Thus, it isn't surprising that dates are stated in relationship to days or seasons in the church calendar. While we may think of, say, Easter as a single day, it is a season in many Christian church calendars; hence, the "second Wednesday of Easter."

Part of the Christian calendar is based on the secular calendar, and part is derived from the lunar calendar. Thus, Michaelmas (the traditional day for paying rents in Virginia) is always September 29, but Ash Wednesday moves around. Because the Scandinavian countries relied heavily on church-calendar dating, I find that tables that can calculate the "14th Sunday after Trinitas [Trinity Sunday]" in 1793 are most often found in the Scandinavian reference section of the library.

"Quaker" Dating. This term is something of a misnomer, as the practice of giving the number, rather than the name of a month, was common and not limited to Quakers. Due to the calendar change, through 1751, the first month in England and colonial America was March; beginning in 1752, it was January.

Next week we'll continue our discussion, covering the calendar change, the lost days, double dating, OS and NS (Old Style and New Style), and dates written as "7ber 7th day."

Patricia Law Hatcher, CG, is a technical writer, instructor, and professional genealogist. She has written, edited, and produced numerous publications and has written articles for The American Genealogist, The Maine Genealogist, the New Hampshire Genealogical Record, The Virginia Genealogist, Ancestry Magazine. She is the author of Producing a Quality Family History (SLC: Ancestry, 1996).