Are dates from January 1 to March 24 normalized in English Records Indexes?
I have noticed that records coming from England Births and Christenings 1538-1975 (and other English record indexes) such as https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NNG7-P6F show dates such as "16 Jan 1614". Prior to 1752, when Britain adopted the Gregorian Calendar, the new year was considered to begin on March 25, and dates from Jan 1 to March 24 would be included with the prior year's records. Can I assume that the indexers copied the year verbatim (so the above would actually be "16 Jan 1614/5") or that they uniformly translated the Julian year to the Gregorian year (so the above would be "16 Jan 1613/4"). I looked through the detailed info on the index and do not see a mention of any convention followed. Any guidance on how to handle these cases, or is it a case of "who knows, find the original record"?
jeff
Answers
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There has always been a lot of inconsistency with regards to this issue. Where there have been multiple indexing projects involving the same records, I have seen some dates indexed with, say, "1614" representing 16 Jan 1614/15, but others as "1615". If the "index exactly what is written" rule is applied, the end result would usually mean indexing as "1614". As I do not index, I do not know if indexing a record with a double-date format is even possible. If it is, this certainly never gets reflected once the record reaches the FamilySearch, online database.
Unfortunately, inconsistency would continue to be the case, as long as there might be different instructions provided to indexers depending on an individual indexing project. It would at least be interesting to know if there are any generic instructions with regards to how to index these dates.
Of course, there are also those more unusual examples where "1614/15" would actually be found in the original record / parish register (for 1 January - 24 March events). I wonder what the instructions are for how to index these - given (unlike with some websites) they will never appear in that format once placed online?
One final point is that if a date is entered as "16 January 1614/15" within a Family Tree "Date" field, it will standardize as "16 January 1615"!
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Yes, that is what I expected. It will vary based on the indexing project and tools. This is just one of the those incidents of "If I were in charge"... it would be great if there were standards for metadata gathering for indexing projects: i.e. always describe your date handling policy and include that in the description for the database, etc.
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Just to add a couple of points.
Firstly, even if "The Management" instituted a perfect policy that was adhered to 100% of the time for new indexing, one still has to cope with those old projects where indexing was not subject to a clear policy about the year in those first months. Therefore, looking at the original and trying to work out what's going on is the only way forward.
Secondly, the adoption of 1 January as the start of the New Year was not uniform across all of Great Britain because Scotland had already moved to 1 January in 1600. They were still on the Julian Calendar as far as the date-and-month went, so there was no serious confusion crossing the Border between Scotland and England, but their year changed at different times.
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