Hi Cliff, They're two separate thoughts. First, when people use "died in his/her Nth year", meaning an actual age of N-1, it usually matches up with the known birthdate, as it should by definition. If you see a case where it's off by one year exactly, I would question if the user properly understood the difference, was bad at math, mis-informed or the garvestone was mis-iterpreted. Second, the transcriptions of Columbia County inscriptions that I'm using lately have numerous instances where I look at an entry and "know" the age or date of death "must" be wrong because it doesn't "equate" to a known DOB. I've thought of posting on this phenomenon to see if others have noticed this when I saw your post and kind of conflated the two issues. Jim -----Original Message----- From: nycolumb-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:nycolumb-bounces@rootsweb.com]On Behalf Of Cliff Lamere Sent: Monday, August 17, 2009 2:08 PM To: nycolumb@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [NYCOLUMB] Age on a gravestone Jim, Just so I am sure, what was "such a regular thing?" Are they regularly N-1, regularly N, or do they just regularly not match up with what you already have (for various reasons)? Cliff ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Brady wrote: >When I see so-and-so died in his/her Nth year, I understand his/her actual >age to be N-1. > >I've been working my way through some of the graveyard transcriptions of >Columbia County and am non-plussed when they don't match up with what I >already know because it's such a regular thing. > >I don't know the absolute reason, but in many cases in may be a bad reading >of the gravestone that causes the date of death, minus the given age, to not >match up with the known birthdate. It may be innumeracy. It may be that the >person supplying the info for the marker wasn't knowledgeable. In some cases >I can surmise what went wrong and add a note to my citation. In other cases, >if it was real importnat to my work, I would want to get another citation >from another source, say a funeral record or obit. > >Jim > > > ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to NYCOLUMB-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message