I like your idea, especially when you consider that Europians (ie Ireland, England etc land of our forefathers) all date things by month, day, year. Your method would still be easier to understand and absolutely helps with computer age indexing. On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 2:45 PM, Jimmy Scamman <jimscamman@hotmail.com>wrote: > Much has been written about how to write dates. My personal preference > stems from using a very large computer database. The most important part > of a date first, the year. When I want to sort 100,000 people by date, I > want the year first and I use a 4 digit year in every case so that all of > the data lines up for easy viewing. Therefore, I convert to the modern > date, and make a notation that 1662 is really 1661-62 in the comment > section of that piece of data. The next most important info is the month > and lastly the day. I use a three-letter month, again so everything lines > up, and I use a two-digit day for the same reason. So if I encounter the > date 4 11 1661, I convert it to 1662 Jan 04 and remark 1661-62 to remind me > that I have converted the Julian date to Gregorian. If I am not sure of > the info, I do not change the date. Sometimes the date has already been > changed for me, so I don't change every date automatically. I like to find > original sources that indicate w! > hich day is the actual date mentioned. So when I am looking for a Mary > Smith in my database who was born about 1660, I can pull a report of all > the Mary Smiths in my database and sort them by date. It takes about 2 > seconds to find the person I need. The conventional and traditional dating > putting the day first takes quite a few minutes to find the right person > and when doing a considerable amount of research means that time is of the > essence. Professional genealogists will say I do it wrong. So be it. My > response to them is... Join the Computer Age. > > > _______________________________________________ > RootsWeb NHROCKIN Mailing List > http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/usa/NH/rockingham.html > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > NHROCKIN-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message >