UK England Gloucestershire Burials Image name : 008043580-00247, Batch ID-M3MM SXF

jeanmanwaring1

I refer to the very strange way in which the date of burial was written :-

e.g - was buried the '16th day of the 12th month called February'- this continues throughout the pages. Which is it - December or February - ? I have left the month blank as I can see no other way of indexing this problem !

DHilary2

Hello,

I'm afraid I can't open the batch so may not to be able to help accurately.

If the year is pre-1752, then the 12th month would be February as the year began on 25th March and continued through the months until 24th March. Thus March is the first month and February the 12th. There has been a big discussion recently about whether or not we can assume that, but as the month is clearly named as February, I don't think that is making any assumption.

I hope this helps.

Hilary.

jeanmanwaring1

Thanks Hilary, I will go along with that. I should have worked that out myself as I did bring to mind that the year began on 25th March but because this is an unusual way of writing the date, I didn't want to index too many batches just in case it was incorrect. Regards Jean.

David Iles

Hi Jean,

I have a similar batch at the moment - the image number differs from yours only in that I have -00120 and you have -00247. My records are around the 1720s.

I agree that March is 'Month 1', whether it be before 25th or not, which does lead to some confusion about which year date to index. If you look at entries before and after, these are usually sequential and it's clear when the year should change (25 March). In my batch/image there is an entry for "1st Mo. 20th 1720/21" which seems to acknowledge that "March" will cover two year dates. From context, the year of that burial was 1720; the next entries were "Do. 24th" and "Do 28th", meaning 24 Mar 1720 and 28 Mar 1721; the one after that was "2nd Mo. 11th 1721", which confirms the change of year.

You might also find your entries can already be found on Familysearch - I found several of mine, choosing less usual names to search on. There are no images to see, if you find them, but you can see how other indexers recorded the date (I think this was done in 2014).

Regards

David