GENEALOGICAL NOTES AND ANECDOTES

á la recherche du temps perdu

This web site represents an ongoing project by which to document a system of kinship that exists among some families which, for the most part, were settled in British North America and in its succession by the United States of America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because this system of kinship is rather extensive and, at some points, is traceable into the European Middle Ages, the completion of this project, which was begun 11 November 1998, will yet require a number of years. Accordingly, the data provided at this web site are incomplete. Information at this web site is believed to be accurate but accuracy is by no means guaranteed. The user is advised to check with other sources before relying on information provided here.

The system of kinship, which is illustrated here, is demonstrated through masculine succession and with branching through females. In general, the method of illustration is chronological and analytic.

Although this project may seem like an experiment in passéisme, it is devoted to the species of research that Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo called 'intrahistoria,' that is, to history writ small.

This web site is always under construction. For entries preceded by an asterisk (*), further information is forthcoming. Persons wishing to contribute information to this web site, or who wish to make inquiries, may do so by addressing their email to:

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Julian and Gregorian Calendars in British North America

While converting dates between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars, it must be remembered that, under the Julian calendar, New Year's Day was celebrated in Great Britain and her colonies, including British North America, on the Feast of the Annunciation, that is, on 25 March. Thus, for example, the day following 24 March 1626 was 25 March 1627. What this also means, to take the example further, is that dates on the British Julian calendar between 1 January 1626 and 24 March 1626 correspond to the range of Gregorian dates between 11 January 1627 and 4 April 1627. Accordingly 25 March 1627 on the British Julian calendar corresponds to 5 April 1627 on the Gregorian calendar. Under the Gregorian calendar, New Year's Day, of course, is 1 January.

The British continued to use the Julian calendar with New Year's Day as 25 March until 1752. The British Calendar Act of 1751 for 1752 specified that 2 September 1752, under the Gregorian calendar, would be followed by 14 September 1752, under the Gregorian calendar. Accordingly, in Great Britain, 25 March 1752 was celebrated as New Year's Day under the Julian calendar and the following New Year's Day was celebrated on 1 January 1753 under the Gregorian calendar.

DATES OF THE GREGORIAN REFORM
Adapted from Karl T. Hagen: History of the Western Calendar: http://www.polysyllabic.com/CalHist.html

Birthdate Calculator
By Benjamin D. Buckner, Ph. D.

This utility calculates birthdates from death dates and age of death in day/month/year format. It assumes, in all cases, that the New Year commences on 1 January.

Discussion of Birthdate Calculations from Date of Death and Age at Death
By Benjamin D. Buckner, Ph. D., edited by Bill Hayes

This version of the birth date calculator uses the first two of the three different computation methods:

1. 30-day fixed-length month (the "8870" system is a variant of this)

2. Calendar month

3. 28-day fixed-length month (uses a 13-month year)

Despite many vehement claims to the contrary, all three of these methods are to be encountered in historical Y/M/D or Y/M/W/D age (or time-elapsed) calculations. Based on limited evidence, it appears that 30-day-fixed is probably more likely to have been used in later times, but the 28-day month seems at least to dominate arithmetic texts from the early 1800s on back in the US. The calendar-month method seems to have coexisted with both systems, considered to be more correct but little-used due to its relative complexity. It is best to compare the results of the three calculations for known death date, age, and birth date combinations which approximate the context of the unknown date as closely as possible.

Subtraction Order

There has been some concern as to whether subtraction order (low-order place to high-order place vs. high-order place to low-order place) makes a difference with these calculations. It apparently does not with fixed-month calculations. For real-month calculations, it can, depending on how the borrowing is done. When borrowing days from months (in the low-high), the number of days should probably be the length of the month before the month which is borrowed from. If the high-low calculation uses this same length, as it probably should, then the low-high and high-low should give the same result. Note, however, that I haven't proven these propositions rigorously so some doubt does still linger. Such a low-high implementation is used in the birth date calculator, and a similar high-low function is also provided in the source code, though it is not used.

Borrowing Approximations in Fixed-Month-Length Systems

The fixed-month systems, despite being mostly free from concerns over subtraction order, have conceptual difficulties in the way they borrow. While year lengths in fixed-month systems are typically given in terms of months and days, the actual calculation of time elapsed in these systems usually seems to neglect the left-over days when borrowing (see The American Tutors' Assistant , J. Crukshank, Philadelphia, 1813 -- Early American Imprints, Series 2, #27718). Since neglecting the days seems to be a common (though mathematically questionable) practice, my fixed calculation functions always drop this term as well, but it is entirely possible that the calculation of age in some instances may have preferred to take the extra days into account.

The Curious 28-day Month

I have no direct evidence of the 28-day-month (with 13-month year) having been used in Y/M/D ages on tombstones yet, but 17th ( Cocker's Arithmetick , Edward Cocker, London, 1691.), 18th ( The American Youth's Instructor, Daniel Fenning, Dover, New Hampshire, 1795), and early 19-century British and American sources indicate that it was definitely the preferred method for Y/M/W/D time-elapsed calculations and generally preferred for Y/M/D calculations. The use of a 30-day month for calculations in contrast is unattested until the late 1800s so far as I can tell (and I have yet to see any attestation personally, though I've been told they exist). For an age given with weeks, the birth date calculator can still be used by multiplying the number of weeks by 7 and adding this to the number of days, and then using the 28-day calculation result.

Daniel Fenning notes in his late 18th-century American Youth's Instructor (see above, p. 49):

Though 13 months are said to make a year and servants commonly reckon a month 28 days: yet you are to observe, that in trade, and transacting business by a month is meant a Calendar Month , that is from any day of the month to the same day of the next month: Thus, from the 5th of February to the 5th of March , or from the 18th of April to the 18th of May is a month.

(Fenning's italics - long-'s' and ligatures transliterated.)

This note tells us two extremely significant things:

1. The 28-day month was then in "common" use, apparently due to its comparative simplicity.

2. Though the 28-day month was common, "Calendar Months" were considered to be more technically correct, at least by Fenning. However, the frequency of the 28-day month in arithmetic books aimed at practical calculations and the fact that Fenning's own examples use it as well suggest to me that the technically preferred calendar month was probably not used very often, except perhaps in such trivial cases as he cites.

It should also be said that a few of the works noted mention in passing a "solar" year of 12 "solar" months and a "lunar" year of 13 "lunar" months, but these terms are little-used outside the context of simple definition and the lunar month (approximated to 28-days) is still the only one used in computation examples where "lunarity" and "solarity" are denoted. Generally, the arithmetics at least mention the actual length of the year in days and hours but they do little with it. One might perhaps see a glimmer of the 30-day month in the guise of a "solar" month, but none of the sources are really clear whether this is to be considered 30 days or 1/12 of the 365 days and 6 hours in a year.

The identification of the 28-day month in old record beds should be easy though. Approximately 1 in 26 ages in such records should indicate an age of 12 months (1/2 borrow from the years place and 1/13 of those give 12 mos.). Neither of the other systems would be expected to give this result as a matter of course. Ages in weeks, as mentioned, are a good indicator too. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear when the common preferred method changed from the 28-day to the 30-day approximation system. The best evidence so far seems to indicate this would have been in the mid-to-late 1800s in the United States. Data for other regions is so far lacking.

Julian and Gregorian Calendars

The calculator also now allows Julian calendar dates, but you cannot mix Julian and Gregorian dates or ages in the same calculation. Generally, the Julian result will be identical, but there are a few exceptions, namely for certain date combinations which cross century years which are not divisible by 400 (e.g. 1400, 1500, 1700, 1800, 1900, ...). None of around ten pre-1820 sources which I examined even acknowledged the existence of the slight year-length difference, including the usually pedantic and meticulous Fenning, so the chances that people at the time remembered to account for it are small.

Real-Time Accuracy

Interestingly, the 28-day method is the most accurate of these three in terms of its ability to get time-elapsed. The calendar-month method of course gives a result that is really rather useless for measuring how much real time has passed between two events since the month is not a fixed unit of time in that system. The 30-day does have a month that is fixed, but it normally neglects 5 and 97/400 days while the 28-day only neglects 1 and 97/400 days. Of course, the fact that month units are so inconsistent probably explains why no one uses them for measuring real time anymore. Even the most modest computer systems routinely measure time and date in seconds if not milliseconds (converting to Y/M/D only for the user's convenience). However, this accuracy concern is of no real bearing on the question of historicity.

Why Bother?

Aside from the more general question of "why bother with history," certain people have raised the question "why worry about the calculation method if there is already error from other sources?" When phrased more thoughtfully, this is a good question, but a sad fact of life is that all data contains some degree of error. This does not mean that trying to reduce error is pointless or that all data is useless. The question really should be "how much error is introduced by a wrong choice of calculation method compared to error arising from other sources ?"

I can't answer this exactly. For one thing the "other sources of error," which I'll call "inherent error" are likely to vary in frequency and magnitude from source to source. From the few record beds I've seen evidence for, I would roughly guess that the error rate tends to be something on the order of 10% and the magnitude in root-mean-square-error over all samples is around 1 or 2 days (if you don't know what this means, just figure that this is about the size you would expect in a "typical" error). Now the difference between 30-day and calendar month-systems is actually fairly close to this (which also makes me worry that some of the error quoted above may be due to some as-yet unconsidered calculation method) so choosing the correct method between those two is roughly (I know this is far from exact) only a matter of cutting the error in half. The 28-day method is the real joker because it commonly comes up with a month's difference from the 30-day and calendar results and very often shows at least a small difference. I haven't rigorously computed its error contribution, but I feel very confident that it overwhelms the inherent error rate and may be significantly larger than the inherent error magnitude in all but the most error-prone data sources. Therefore avoiding this calculation error can be expected to yield large improvements in the accuracy of calculated birth dates.

This JavaScript utility uses tables, the forms interface and, of course, JavaScript.

ARCHIVAL LINKS

United States National Archives and Records Administration
Library of Congress: American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library

Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880 - 1901)
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (1894 - 1922)
A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U. S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774 - 1875
Journal of the Confederate Congress
[Provisional Confederate Congress: 4 February 1861 - 17 February 1862
First Confederate Congress: 18 February 1862 - 17 February 1864
Second Confederate Congress: 2 May 1864 - 18 March 1865]

Maryland State Archives
Maryland Historical Society: Library
Exploring Maryland's Roots: Library
St. Mary's Families

DeBow's Review (1846 - 1869)
Southern Literary Messenger (1835 - 1864)

Cornell University: Making of America
Louisiana State University Digital Library
The Perseus Digital Library: American Civil War
University of Michigan: Making of America
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Documenting the American South
The Library of Virginia

Louisiana Archives Index: Orleans Parish: Directories
Louisiana Archives Index: Orleans Parish: Cemeteries
New Orleans Marriage Index: Daily Picayune (1837 - 1857)
New Orleans Death Index: Daily Picayune (1837 - 1857) + 1870
New Orleans Public Library: Louisiana Division
New Orleans Public Library: City Archives

New Georgia Encyclopedia

The Handbook of Texas Online
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Texas Monthly

Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) [The last "literary" edition.]
The Avalon Project at Yale Law School: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy
Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics
Virtual American Biographies

English-America: The Voyages, Vessels, People, and Places
The Family History Society of Cheshire
The South Cheshire Family History Society

DATABASES

Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
Old-Maps.co.uk
United States Gazetteer
United States Atlas: 1895

RECIPROCAL LINKS

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This site is always under construction.

The author and designer of this web site is an alumnus of the
University of Toronto

Crescit occulto velut arbor ævo . . . . Horace, Odes 1.12.45

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