Claire, I don't know if anyone has helped you with this question yet. I had a somewhat similar experience where I had two birthdates for my ggrandfather. My Swiss cousin informed me that the first was the real birthdate, and the second was like a baptism date. In fact, here is his explanation of my situation: "In several cases, you seem to have baptism dates instead of birth dates. The family records were established 1825/1826. Before, there were church records. The church did not record the births but the baptisms. That's why in earlier years, we often have baptism dates instead of birth dates. In most cases, it is not possible to find out the birth date." Hope this helps! Karen P.S. I've never posted a message to rootsweb. Hope you get this, and if I did something wrong, someone will tell me!! >X-Message: #1 >Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 22:44:26 -0400 >From: "CJ Lisa" <[email protected]> >To: [email protected] >Message-ID: <[email protected]> >Subject: Re: [SWITZ] Birthdate differences >Content-Type: text/plain; > charset="iso-8859-1" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > >My grandfather, who was born in 1886, was not sure about the month he was >born as different paperwork had it for March or for April. He decided that >he would celebrate his birthday in March. The civil records that I got had >his birthday as April and I have not had the opportunity to check the church >records. > >It may seem odd, but he was 1 of 15 children and only 6 survived beyond age >20. With that large a family and probably not being very well off, >birthdays were probably not celebrated in those days -- but maybe someone >else can clarify that. > >Claire -------------------------------------------------------------------- Union County, South Carolina GenWeb County Coordinator: http://www.rootsweb.com/~scunion/union.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my "family" at http://www.geocities.com/heartland/meadows/4458 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Surnames: Adams Baldwin Beckham Behl Benge Bennett Bertling Blair Braddock Bradley Brown Bryant Burris Canterbury Carty Catlett Cleveland Croshaw Crowell Davenport Dean Debnam DeMoss Eskew Fauncis Ferguson Files Flaugan Fleming Foster Frith Garnett Gooding Graves Gryder Haie Haley Haney Harris Haugland Hawkins Henderson Johannessen Johnson Kaiser Keeling Kimball Kimbrough Kincheloe King Koonce Lane Lansdale Lee Little Littlefield Mackey Manley McNail Miller Monsen Montgomery Nance Olsen Parker Perrin Perry Randolph Ronhovde Seaggs Seay Sherrin Sides Simmons Simpson Singleton Stampfli Stribling Taliaferro Taylor Thomas Tygart Underwood Vaughan Watkins Wernli Wilkenson Williams Williamson Woodruff ---------------------------------------------------------------------