At 10:57 PM 04/07/1999 -0500, you (Carole Dutton Malisiak) wrote: >I spoke to a woman at the FHC yesterday who told me that the Quakers >decided to go along with everyone else's dates in 1752. So all Quaker >dates after 1752 should be in our regular calendar keeping. All dates >before then would be off. For example, 21 1m 1735 would be March and >10m would be December. [snip] Hi, Carole and other Duttons: More on the same subject; it should be kept in mind that the Quakers were not the only ones whose recordkeeping was affected by the Julian/Gregorian dual calendar before 1752. I have seen records kept by Puritan governments in Massachusetts Bay for persons I highly doubt were Quakers that used the March=1st month convention. Sometimes it seems that each recordkeeper made his own decision. (Hint: watch out for overly conservative recordkeepers in the first few years after 1752!!) The other major trap is the double-year dating for dates in the range January 1 to March 24 (March 25 was New Year's Day in the civil Julian calendar in use in colonial America before 1753): for one town clerk, Feb. 2, 1735 might come after December, 1735; for another, before April, 1735. Many used the convention "February 2, 1735/6" but by no means all did, and when books were published sometimes the editor interpreted such dates and sometimes printed them exactly as found. The only reasonably sure way I have found to keep discrepancies to a minimum is, as Carole suggested, to examine the original documents. But *DON'T* look at the specific record IN ISOLATION! If it's in a list of events in chronological order, and some of the ones that follow are both after March and dated with the same year, then it's pretty certain that the writer "changed years" on January 1. If your specific record is not in such a list, look for a series of dated items in the same document, in the same handwriting, that crosses the March 25 boundary. If you can show that the writer has a pattern, apply it to your own record. As a last resort, ask whether the year makes better sense one way than another. For example, I once had a puzzle over whether a date recorded as, say, March 10, 1735, should be interpreted as 1734/5 or 1735/6. The original document was no longer in existence; all I had was a published book, and it reported dates exactly as written *but* rearranged in family units. As luck would have it, it was a birth date for a child in a large family. The clue was, the mother was nearly as reproductively predictable as the ticks from one of those Dutton Clocks we've been hearing about. She had children in December 1729, May 1732, April 1734, the February 1735 under discussion, May 1737, and June 1739. It is quite possible that child number three was born 10 months after child two, and child four 39 months after that; but given a choice between 29-23-22-27-25 months for the intervals and 29-23-10-39-25, I chose the former without much hesitation. Then, of course, I recorded my reasoning in my footnote. Such a procedure is a bit iffy, and doesn't take into account (in this case) of a possible miscarriage in the middle of the 39 months, but since you have to guess anyway in most genealogical software, it may be better than nothing. This is only an example, but it's part of the reason I find this hobby so much fun. That and the stories, of course. Like the Dutton Clock at #10 Downing Street! Darrell Darrell A. Martin formerly of the Dutton District, Springfield, Vermont currently in exile in Addison, Illinois darrellm@sprynet.com