Use of Old Style Julian versus New Style Gregorian dates
In the English-speaking world transition to the Gregorian calendar occurred in 1753. I was told by a Family Search help technician that dates from all documents are displayed exactly as found in the source text, that is even a Julian date, without clarification as to which kind of date it is. This is a violation of general publishing practice, where dates are converted to Gregorian and stated in that form, not necessarily accompanied by the original Julian form.
As an example, the citation at https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:JMVY-MZG gives a christening date as 27 Jun 1605. A user will naturally enter this under Vitals, yielding a misleading Julian date in the entry.
Indexers should therefore convert all pre-1753 dates to Gregorian form. Online tools are available for this purpose, such as https://planetcalc.com/7083/
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Jeffery
As you will know if you have made extensive references to English parish registers, the majority will record the pre-1753 dates as the year that ran between 25 March and 24 March. However, I have encountered some that used the dual dating system for events that took place between 1 January and 24 March and, quite rarely, some that disregard the convention and show the particular year for the period 1 January to 31 December.
As you say, it appears that indexing projects instructions are almost always to index dates and names exactly as they were recorded. Where possible, I check the original register if I find a date indexed as, say, 15 February 1605. If I find this to mean the event took place on 15 February 1605/06, I record it in that format in my Family Tree input and ensure it standardises as 15 February 1606. It might be debatable if this is the correct procedure, but the 1606 standardisation is certainly the way things operate in Family Tree.
As has been pointed out to me in the past, Family Tree is a worldwide project and the change from Julian to Gregorian calendar took place at different times throughout the world, so we should not concentrate too much on the specific situation regarding England.
The points you raise are really not as straightforward as they might appear. For example, in saying: "Indexers should therefore convert all pre-1753 dates to Gregorian form", I believe you are requesting a change in FamilySearch indexing practice. Otherwise, individual indexers would be breaking with project instructions.
If the current practice is, as you suggest, a "... a violation of general publishing practice", I'm sure you will find this to be widespread when it comes to other genealogical websites - e.g. at Find My Past and Ancestry.
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After looking more closely at the website reached via your second link I see I have largely missed your point! I now see your suggestion to be to add the "missing days" (e.g. index 5 February 1582 as 15 February 1582) to take into account the 1753 "adjustment". However, again I must say that I have never knowingly encountered this practice on other major genealogical websites, viz. FMP, Ancestry, The Genealogist, etc. So, I still feel your suggestion runs contrary to general practice, rather than in line with it, as you seem to imply.
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An index of a record should be the best exact transcription of a record possible without correction or interpretation no matter what any publishing standard says because one is not dealing with publishing standards here. One is dealing with finding a way to lead researchers to the original record by making the original data searchable.
It is up to the researchers to then find the original record, know what they are looking at, interpret it correctly, and then make use of it correctly. That is not the job of the indexer.
It does sound like that publishing standard needs to be updated. Why on earth would they not include both dates? Leaving out important information is not what standards are supposed to do. I have a bibliography of scientific articles my father published and I'm having a terrible time figuring out who the co-authors were because the publishing standard of the time was to only include the initials of the first and middle names of the authors, not their names.
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Not related to indexing directly, but you definitely should be able to choose which calendar a date is written in, especially regarding profiles where many sources play together. My great-grandfather's birthdate is written in the Julian calendar in the metrical book, but it's written in the Gregorian one in his marriage certificate etc.
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One of the great features of Family Tree is the tremendous flexibility the standardization model gives us in entering data. While in usual terms "standardization" implies strict constraints, in Family Tree it provides just the opposite: the ability to enter data almost any way we may need or want to. We can choose which calendars a date is written in. Clarity in communication would, of course, require us to label what we are doing.
- First you should decide what form of the data would be best for searching on. For that we can only pick one date, but searches only use the year and are never exact anyway so that is not a big issue.
- Second, type in the date to use for searching and set the standard to it.
- Finally go back into the data box, type out the full date as you want it displayed, and click outside the box, not in the drop down menu, to enter the date without changing the standard.
This allows you to enter full information like this:
Here, by the way, is a great site that converts between more calendars than I knew existed that I stumbled on this morning while writing this: https://calendarhome.com/calculate/convert-a-date
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The Julian to Gregorian calendar conversion did not happen in the same year everywhere. Also, there were significant differences in when the year began.
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