The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Calendar changes wreak date havoc
This story was published March 5, 2000
When I was a gay young blade, I cut a broad swath through the coeds at Brigham Young University. One Saturday, I had three dates with three different women - all named Ruth. One of them was a keeper and I married her, but that's another story.
Now that I'm a gray-haired old genealogist, I juggle with even more dates, and can't avoid confusion by arranging for them all to be the same.
Yes, dates can bedevil genealogists and it's little wonder because days keep disappearing from our calendar.
This accounts for the October Revolution occurring in November, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Genealogists don't have to cope with ancient changes in the calendar because we can't trace genealogies far enough back to encounter the first big upheaval in the marking of time. But a little background helps understand what came much later.
Our calendar traces to ancient Babylon, where 60 was a favored number and 6 times 60 (360) was downright heavenly.
So, our calendar started out with 360 days, divided into 10 months of 30 days apiece. This was simple enough, and good enough in those ancient days, but not for 446 B.C., when Julius Caesar added 5 days and divided 365 by 12, thus adding two months.
Julius named one of the months after himself and one after the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. Julius put 31 days in July, and Augustus insisted that his month have the same number.
This threw the calendar out of whack, so Julius borrowed the days from February and invented leap year to adjust the new Julian Calendar every four years. But a problem remained: The year - based on astrological tables - is not exactly 365.25 days long. A year is a mere 365.242199 days.
Hardly seemed worth a bother, but then astronomers discovered in 1582 that the pesky 0.008 of a day (about 5 minutes, 37 seconds) had put the calendar 10 days ahead of the stars. Since Christians were celebrating Easter on the wrong day, Pope Gregory corrected the calendar, ordaining that Oct. 5, 1582, would be Oct. 15.
The Gregorian calendar eventually became the world standard, but its adoption was fraught with controversy and downright rebellion. Pesky Protestant nations refused to accept a pope's tinkering. They finally capitulated, one by one, until 1927 when Turkey adopted the Gregorian Calendar and the adoption was complete.
Great Britain and her colonies adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752. In that year, Sept. 2 became Sept. 14. The change prompted George Washington to adjust his birthday from Feb. 11, 1751, to Feb. 22, 1752, making himself a year and 11 days younger.
He changed the year of his birth because the act of Parliament that introduced the change also adjusted the first day of the year from March 25 to Jan. 1. Some believe the father of our country could do no wrong, but he was very wrong in changing his birth date - genealogically speaking, anyway.
And this is one of the objects of this column. Don't adjust dates. Genealogists should record them as they were at the time of the event.
But we need to be aware of the changes in the calendar, and that isn't as simple as it seems. For example, Alaska didn't convert to the Gregorian Calendar until Oct. 5, 1867 - according to the old calendar. That date became Oct. 18, 1867, by the new calendar. But Russia, which owned Alaska, didn't adopt the Gregorian Calendar until after the October Revolution, which occurred Oct. 24-25 by the Julian Calendar, but on Nov. 6-7 by the Gregorian Calendar. Again, genealogists should record events associated with the revolution as Oct. 24-25. Alaska adopted the Gregorian Calendar when it became U.S. property in 1867.
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The Tri-City Genealogical Society will meet at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Richland Regional Family History Center, 1314 Goethals Road, Richland. Bring three family names with places to research.