Dates in A&D

Dates are very important to genealogists. You may spend much of your time searching for, recording, and verifying the dates of significant events—such as dates of births, marriages, deaths, burials, baptisms, engagements, endowments, banns, gets, etc.

Unfortunately, dates are a very complicated subject and can create problems for you. Date problems are most serious with American records prior to the 19th century, and with European records from the 16th up to the early 20th century. Date problems occur because of the (1) different calendar systems, (2) different year-start and year-end dates, and (3) different recording methods used in each country during recent centuries.

A&D simplifies data entry and reduces date problems by giving you powerful new features and easy-to-use standards for the recording and processing of dates. For example, A&D provides . . . .

Automatic detection and marking of Julian (Old-Style) dates.
Optional date entries to indicate:
- Reliability—such as family-reported or exact-and-confirmed dates
- Approximation—such as after, before, circa, or question marks
- Season—such as summer, fall, winter, or spring
- Source reference
Optional entry and display of Jewish/Hebrew, French Republican, or even B.C. dates.
Entry of dates with or without separators—such as slash bars, hyphens, or spaces.
Standards that eliminate the ambiguity of dates such as 01/12/97—which could mean 12 Jan 1997, 1 Dec 1997, 12 Jan 1897, 1 Dec 1897, or (if entered before 1700) 12 Mar 1697 or 1 Feb 1697.
Automatic detection and rejection of non-existent days, months, and years. For example, in England and the American colonies, the months of January and February did not exist in 1751. The days 7 March to 17 March did not exist in Greece in 1923. And Gregorian (New-Style) dates did not exist anywhere prior to 1582.

Click on More About Dates for more information on calendar systems, the offset and short years, and date recording.

These and many other date features of A&D (for example, Double Dating, year ranges, dates that living persons were last known to be living, referencing notes, LDS date entries, and the Eternal Calendar) are clearly explained in detail in Chapter 14 of our Adventures in Genealogy book.

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