Julian vs. Gregorian Dates
I asked a question about Sverige, Stockholm—Register till kyrkoböcker, 1546–1927 [Del 9][MQQV-R1Z] (SWEDEN) and received some responses including one that said the problem [with the instructions] was fixed. A change was made, but it is still unclear to me how we are to handle dates for this project prior to 1753. The instructions say, "The Gregorian calendar was adopted in Sweden in March 1753. Prior to 1753, the year on the Julian calendar began in March and continued to the next February. This would mean that the 3rd month in 1699 would be May. In the Gregorian calendar adopted in 1753, the 3rd month would be
March." Then there is a link to a date converter. However, the date converter uses the names of months NOT the numbers. So if the date in the project is 5/3 1704, do I put 5 March 1704 into the calculator or 5 May 1704?
Answers
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If you have month names, then you don't need a converter: those didn't change. March was never May.
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It uses the numbers NOT the month names.
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Sorry, I was perhaps a bit terse. I was trying to say that a date converter that uses month names isn't much of a date converter, because month names didn't change. The fifth of May is the fifth of May, regardless of the year, calendar, or country.
I'm guessing that the indexing field for the month expects names, while the document contains numbers. I think this sort of question is actually much easier to answer without a calculator or converter: in the time it would take to figure out what input the converter expects, I can just count it out on my fingers. :-)
By the old reckoning (i.e., the Julian calendar), the fifth day of the third month is the fifth day of the month of May.
I suspect that what the converter was actually designed to do was to determine the year. This is only really relevant to dates between 1 January and 25 March. (I think it's the 25th, anyway.) The fifth day of the eleventh month of 1704 comes out to 5 January 1705 by the new reckoning.
The really funky stuff happens in the first twenty-some days of March, if the months are given in numbers rather than names: the fifth day of the first month of 1704 Julian is 5 March 1705 Gregorian. A date that looks like three weeks later (26th day of the first month of 1704), on the other hand, is actually a year earlier: 26 March 1704. This is because the numbering of the months applied to the whole month, while the numbering of the years was incremented on the twenty-somethingth of March.
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