On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 07:25:14 -0400, Dennis Kowallek <kowallek@iglou.com> wrote: >>The Gregorian Date Calculator, one of the Tools found in Personal >>Ancestral File (PAF), the genealogy program developed by the Church of >>Jesus Christ of Latter-Days Saints (LDS) calculates the birth date as >>Saturday, 16 September 1797. > >That's odd. Legacy's date calculator says 17 Sep 1797. I just counted >backwards 10 months and 19 days from 5 Aug of this year and landed on 16 >Sep. So there must be a bug in Legacy's date calculator and I am off to >report it. Now that I look at the problem, both answers are correct. It all depends on the direction you count. 38 years, 10 months, and 19 days forward from 17 Sep 1797 gives you 5 Aug 1836. But 38 years, 10 months, and 19 days backward from 5 Aug 1836 gives you 16 Sep 1797. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with the reason for this. ;-) But this poses an interesting question. When we see quotations like this (I assume Nancy was looking at a tombstone in this case), which method/date is correct? One almost has to get into the head of the person who carved the tombstone to figure this out. -- Dennis Kowallek Hanover Twp., Butler Co. kowallek@iglou.com ******************

To add to the novelty of the exercise trying to figure out birthdates, I'd like to add a little information based on what my great grandmother said of her birth. Whenever asked how old she was she would give years, months, and days. Asking how she could be so precise all the time, she said she knew how many years, then would figure how many months and days from that last birthday. One thing she didn't take into account, and possibly no one else did either was Leap Year. I haven't even attempted to see if any of my ancestors were born during Leap Year or within that 12 month period, but I'm sure it would throw off some of my dates. Ted Crayne