FTM cant even accept the most basic kind of irregular dates, which is dual dates, like 22 Feb 1636/37. That was the old fashioned way of writing dates during the winter months, partly on account of a gap between a previous method of counting the months of the year and the current method. People actually weren't sure what year it was. LOL! Dates from that period confuse people so badly that they are often garbled, so I preserve all of the information I get. An example of why that is important is actually in the example I provided. The son of Eli who is my ancestor is poorly placed in that family. He inherited land between that of his two brothers, is as nearly as I ever got to proving who his parents were! The census and his gravestone both say he was born in 1804. His birth was never recorded in teh Quaker meeting records anywhere in his locality. Eli's first wife died in something like 3 11th month 1803. Quaker dates used the old system I referred to above. THe months didn't have names, they had numbers, and the numbering was either two months ahead or two months behind our current system of months. Eli didn't marry again until 1806. So was he living in sin for two years? For sure his meeting and his family seldom saw him! I don't think so. I think that Ezra was born in on the 3rd of January, 1804, and his mother died of childbirth. You and I can't get the year right when we write the date on the 3rd of January, and it may really have been 1803 in the old dating system, and in 1804 the person responsible for writing it down in the Quaker meeting record could have conceivably not had it straight which year it properly was in the old dating system. Of course, by now, the transcriptions of the Quaker meeting records and transcriptions of those and so on are garbled too, so sometimes I've seen it as 3 11th month 1803, and sometimes I've seen it as 11, 3rd month, 1803, and they could both conceivably mean January 1804. Writing down the exact information I was given fails to multiply the confusion. Other systematically irregular dates are bef 12 Jan 1807, aft 1810, and betw 23 Jan and 4 Jun 1819. FTM can't accept them either. Some other genealogy programs accept them as written, and one that I know of simplifies them to its idea of a shorter format. Sometimes good genealogical sources have multiple dates of life events, and it's important for future researchers to see all of them to be able to match a person in the database with someone they might see in a source they're looking up. That is particularly true of people who emigrated from England to New England during the 17th century. I have a number of ancestors with three widely varying estimates of year of birth. 1581/ 1590/ 1608. Not by coincidence these are common names, so it's particularly important to turn up whatever date information I do have in the search feature and the indexing (which prints what it prints from the date fields and not your notes). For instance, George Allen and George Bishop. Sometimes it is not possible to resolve a conflict between dates of different formats. 1680, 23 Jun 1681, or 5 Aug 1681. If that's what I have, that's what I enter. I don't randomely pick one and stick the others out of sight in the notes! That sometimes happens even in French Canadian genealogy, which is based on extremely accurate and well preserved record keeping. The majority of popular genealogy programs now accept irregular dates exactly as you entered them. Just not FTM. A customer service person at FTM told me I can reenter my entire 14,800 person database and put the dates in the notes. Yours, Dora Smith Austin, TX [email protected] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peggy Ann Vipond" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2006 10:42 PM Subject: Re: [GEN-COMP-TIPS] include all spouses and stepchildren > Hi Dora > What do you call an irregular date. Please give several samples > > Thanks Peggy > > >> I'd love to try it - but FTM won't be of any use to me until they fix >> their >> issue with irregular dates. > > -------------------------------------- > Having trouble with your subscription? Contact the List Admin at > [email protected] > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message > -- Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.3/395 - Release Date: 7/21/2006

Dora FTM - go to File, then Preferences, then click on Date tab. You can set the year for double dates, etc. here. This will take care of the 1696/7 issue. You can say Bef(ore), Aft(er), or Bet(ween), or even Abt (about). You may have a problem entering 1581/1590/1608, and I don't know what you would do about that! Since these seem to be estimates or guesses, they perhaps don't qualify as facts? Patricia Page BC Canada

Sometimes ancestors have multiple dates that various sources over time have associated wtih them. Lose one of them, and you lose the ability to find the ancestor from a source that uses that date. Yours, Dora Smith Austin, TX [email protected] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Patricia Page" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 12:27 AM Subject: Re: [GEN-COMP-TIPS] include all spouses and stepchildren > Dora > > FTM - go to File, then Preferences, then click on Date tab. You can > set the year for double dates, etc. here. This will take care of the > 1696/7 issue. You can say Bef(ore), Aft(er), or Bet(ween), or even > Abt (about). You may have a problem entering 1581/1590/1608, and I > don't know what you would do about that! Since these seem to be > estimates or guesses, they perhaps don't qualify as facts? > > Patricia Page > BC Canada > > > > -------------------------------------- > Having trouble with your subscription? Contact the List Admin at > [email protected] > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message > -- Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.3/395 - Release Date: 7/21/2006