Error 575 FindAGrave - Different birth date Old Style Calendar

Question

The source for the date of birth is from <i> Records of the Town of Braintree,</i> and in that document is listed as Feb. 21, 1725/26.  The way that the year of birth was recorded was based on the Old Style Calendar.  Before 1752 the year began on Lady Day, March 25th,. Dates between January 1st and March 24th were at the end of the year. Old Style (O.S.) and New Style (N.S.) are used to indicate whether the year has been adjusted. Often both dates are used.

So, if the person that manages the Find A Grave memorial chooses to use 1725 and the person that manages the WikiTree profile chooses 1726, instead.  Should that necessarily generate the error 575.  Do each of these errors have to be addressed to remove the profile from the list?  Maybe the function that generates the error report should have a little wiggle room in it?  Like at least one year?

Comments

There was another recent discussion about Julian versus Gregorian .. which I can't find now. I prefer to use the date in the source myself, annotating it with OS or NS if appropriate and adding explanatory notes if necessary. I don't like "correcting" dates as it's easy to fall into the trap of corrections being applied twice or misunderstood. Having said that, I seem to be out of synch with wikitree which seems to want all dates changed to Gregorian.

Of course it's confusing and undesirable to have the same day referred to by multiple dates but that was the reality at the time. Britain was out of synch with Europe with regards to date and the year starting on Jan 1st was already in use in Scotland by 1600 and gradually spread throughout England before it was formalised in 1752. In England people had to start writing both years to avoid confusion so you see lots of dates such as 1 March 1723/4.

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Exactly.  It would be great if both WikiTree and Find A Grave would allow both dates to be used before 1752.  In absence of the capability, however, the application that generates the Error Report could be coded to accept a variance of 365 days between the two databases.

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This might be the earlier discussion that Matthew is referring to, although it's not all that recent:

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/92495/julian-gregorian-dates-more-than-just-which-year-use-problem

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Actually it wasn't, it was a different one, but I'm sure the same issue comes round on a fairly regular basis.

Answer 1

The standard of practice in genealogy is that if you are going to provide only one date that you adjust the year to the Gregorian Calendar.  To do otherwise just causes a series of errors, and frequently causes confusion.  So, in this case it is correct to record the date 21 February 1725 (OS) as 21 February 1726.  I think it is very important in these cases to record a double date in the biography as 21 February 1725/6 to hopefully avoid confusion.

With specific regard to the database error with findagrave, just mark it as a false error.  It is also helpful you click the Status Button on the error report and given a reason why it was a false error.  Finally, if you are feeling really helpful you can leave a message with the findagrave manager that he should fix his error.

One final note that sometimes causes confusion.  We are not truly switching from Gregorian calendar to the Julian calendar.  The difference is we are only changing the start date of the year which originally occurred on 25 March to, of course, on 1 January.  I think of this as Old Style (start 25 March) and New Style (start 1 January) to avoid the discussion of which calendar we are using, but these terms are not consistently used this way.

When the calendar was changed from Julian to Gregorian an adjustment had to be made and 11 days were skipped (2 September 1752, was followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752).  If we are asking the question, what would today’s day be if we had never switched calendars we would have to subtract days to make up for the days skipped (it’s up to a 13 day offset now so today is 21 May 2017 Julian, and 8 May 2017 Gregorian).  And, if we asked the question what day did the Mayflower land if the Julian calendar had been in effect we would add 11 days, so 9 November 1620 Gregorian becomes 20 November 1620 Julian.

But again, this is not what we do in genealogy.  We keep the day as found in the original record (21 February), but adjust the year to New Style dating (1725 to 1726).  And we should show double dates in the biography to make clear that the adjustment has been made.

Comments

One more note regarding the original question.  I don't have a problem with this error, and do not think there should be a one year wiggle room.  The majority of the time I found this one year offset to be an actual error on wikitree.  So it has been helpful in finding and correcting real errors.  When the opposite is true, just mark it as a false error and move on.  In the long run, wikitree will be much better off as it is dating records correctly.