Dating Induced Headaches for the Family Historian: Julian, Gregorian, and Quaker Calendars

Calendar image from Pixabay.com

Did you know that January 1 wasn’t always the first day of the year?

Did you know that Europe and Great Britain and their colonies used different calendars for several centuries?

Did you know that while the Quakers followed the English calendar tradition, they had their own way of expressing dates, since they did not approve of the commonly used names of the months and days in the calendar?

Do you have any idea of how hard this can make the job of the family historian in figuring out whether the person they are researching is their ancestor? For instance, if I knew the death date of the man I was researching was 12 months before the birth of a particular child, I would normally feel safe in the concluding he was not the potential father of that child; however, if it was before 1752 in England or its colonies it might not be impossible at all. For example, if the man died on March 24, 1650 and the child was born March 25, 1651, that isn’t twelve months apart; that child was born one day after the man died! In another example, trying to determine the probable birthdate of my ancestor, based on a gravestone that lists his death date and his age at death, “87 years, nine months, and six days” will differ depending on whether the given ancestor is from Germany or from England, and I have to remember to apply the differences to be as accurate as I can be. In fact, I may have to re-look at all my earlier German-born ancestors when I get back to that part of the family tree in my research plan because I did not know this when I was researching them. I learned it when trying to figure out the Quaker dating system for the branch of my tree I’ll be writing about next, which is rooted in England, Ireland and the British colonies. But before I try to explain the Quaker dating system, I have to go into a little history first.

Julius Ceasar bust in the Museum of Antiquities, Turin Italy [Public domain]
via Wikimedia Commons,
photo by Ángel M. Felicísimo from Mérida, España, CC by 2.0 

In ancient times, each major culture or civilization at its own calendar, each with their own problems. I’m not going into them as it is really complex and they are not really relevant to this discussion. However, in 46 BC, in an attempt to fix problems with the calendars already in use then, Julius Caesar ordered the Roman Empire to follow a calendar consisting of 12 months based on a solar year because he wanted a calendar that better reflected the planting and harvesting seasons of the largely agricultural economy in the Empire at that time. The calendar was used by all of the Empire, which eventually consisted of England and most of Europe. This Julian calendar was pretty much like the calendar we have today with a 12-month year equaling 365 days, the days having 24 sixty-minute hours each (with each minute being 60 seconds long) and divided into seven-day weeks. An extra day was added every fourth year. While the Julian calendar originally began the year on January 1, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, the calendar was gradually aligned with to coincide with important Christian festivals. By the ninth century, parts of Europe began observing the first day of the year on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation (a celebration of the day that the angel Gabriel informed Mary that she would become the mother of the Messiah); the last day of the year was March 24. This new alignment spread throughout Europe and the British Isles over the next couple centuries with England adopting it in the 12^th century.

Cover of Pope Gregory's Papal Bull, in the Public Domain

However, there was also a problem with the Julian calendar, in that it was about 11 minutes too long, which doesn’t sound like much but this slight inaccuracy added one day every 128 years. By the middle of the 16^th century, the Julian calendar was about 10 days ahead of the natural events it was originally based on, including equinoxes, and some church holidays, like Easter, were not occurring in the proper seasons. In October 1582, Pope Gregory issued a papal bull (declaration) implementing a correction of the Julian calendar in which 10 days were dropped from October that year and the method of calculating leap years was changed in such a way as to prevent calendar drift. Additionally, January 1 was made the first day of the new year. The Gregorian calendar is the calendar we use today.

The change to the Gregorian calendar was adopted immediately by Catholic countries. But Protestant countries (including England and its colonies), which did not recognize the authority of the Pope continued using the Julian calendar. Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, Luxembourg, Poland, and Lithuania adopted Pope Gregory’s new calendar that year. Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, and Prussia followed suit within fifty years. But England had split from the Catholic Church only 50 years before Pope Gregory’s declaration and was determined not to bow to the Catholic rule; England held out for almost two centuries.  (Some countries held out longer than England: Russia adopted it in 1918 and Greece adopted in 1922.)

Lunario Novo, Secondo la Nuova Riforma della Correttione del l'Anno Riformato da N.S. Gregorio XIII, printed in Rome by Vincenzo Accolti in 1582, one of the first printed editions of the new calendar. Public Domain

So between 1582 and 1752, there were two calendars in use in Europe and Great Britain, and their respective colonies. Moreover, because the Gregorian calendar was used in significant portions of Europe, those people in Great Britain and its colonies who were aware of the difference in calendars took to dating their documents with both dates between January 1 (the new New Year’s Day) and March 25 (the old New Year’s Day) to avoid misinterpretation, in a system known as “double dating”. The dates were usually indicated as February 14, 1650/1 or February 14, 1650-51. The first few times I saw dates like that on documents, before I was aware of this issue, I thought that the recordkeepers weren’t sure what year the thing had occurred and were giving approximate dates, not that they were being careful to clarify exactly when something occurred under two different legal calendar systems. As you might imagine, this caused difficulty for people who had business with other countries, and they put pressure on the English government to change to the Gregorian calendar.

Finally, Philip Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, on 25 February 1750/1, introduced into the House of Lords an “Act for Regulating the Commencement of the Year and for Correcting the Calendars Now in Use”. The bill passed through Parliament and was signed by George II in May 1851. By this time, the calendar drift had grown to 11 days, and the bill provided that Wednesday, September 2, 1752, was to be followed by Thursday, September 14, 1752, and for New Year’s Day to move from March 25 to January 1 as was already the case in Scotland. In England and Wales, the legal year 1751 was a short year of 282 days, running from March 25 to December 31. 1752 began on January 1. Because 11 days were eliminated from September, the year 1752 was also a short year (355 days). (If anyone ever tries to tell you that something occurred on September 10, 1752, now you know that they are trying to con you as that date did not exist!}

Page for September, in a 1752 Almanac 

In telling family history stories, it becomes necessary to know when the country I’m looking at converted to the Gregorian calendar and whether I must convert dates between the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar to figure out the ages of ancestors or just to make a story clear. If you are related to me or have worked with me, you know my math skills are not optimal. Fortunately, I don’t have to do that. I am eternally grateful to Stephen P Morse of San Francisco who has put a One-Step Julian to Gregorian Conversion Calculator on the Internet. The same page also has a section where you can enter a specific country from a drop-down list and be given the date they changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. (I have used his other webpages for years; he’s got a lot of very helpful one-step calculators and search tools. To explore them, click on the “my other webpages” button at the top of the calendar conversion page I linked above.)

One warning for family historians researching in early North America before I turn to the Quaker calendar. We need to be aware that certain groups in the early colonies of North America had already adopted the Gregorian Calendar before 1752, even in British controlled territory, and were using it in their civic and church records. The Dutch settlers along the Hudson River in New York and northern New Jersey were already using the Gregorian Calendar when they first came to America in the 1620s since most of Holland had been using the Gregorian calendar since 1583, and after 1660, when the English took over the Dutch colonies, the Dutch people were allowed to stay and keep their way of life. Civil and church recorders of the Dutch towns continued the use of the Gregorian Calendar, even though the British governed their settlements and had not adopted the Gregorian Calendar yet. In addition, Palatine German settlements, and some German Lutherans also used the Gregorian calendar as it had been in use in their home countries before they moved to the North American continent. Also, any French, Spanish, or Portuguese colony or settlement would have been using the Gregorian calendar from approximately 1582.

Epistle sent by the London Yearly Meeting for Sufferings in 1751

Now to the Quakers! Quaker dates can be confusing because the Quakers use numbers in their dating system and not month names, and because there was no official day on which every Quaker switched to the Gregorian calendar. The Quakers used a numbering system because they objected to the names of the months and the names of the days of the week in the English calendar because they were based on pagan gods. For them, Sunday was First Day, Monday was Second Day, Tuesday was Third Day, Wednesday was Fourth Day, Thursday was Fifth Day, Friday was Sixth Day, and Saturday was Seventh Day. Until 1752 they had no problem with September through December as month names, because those names were derived from numbers, but after 1752 all months were referred to by Quakers by their number.  They sometimes used Roman numerals for this (i -xii) and sometimes used Arabic numerals (1-12).

In recording dates, in early meeting records the Quakers usually wrote the dates in year, month, day order, or 1687, 9th mo. [or ix], 28th day. After they made the change to the Gregorian calendar, they generally recorded dates in day, month, year order, or 28, 9th mo. [or ix], 1780.

Since the Quakers use a numbering system for their dates, I had to know which calendar they were using in order to know to which month they were actually referring, which sometimes meant reading quite a bit of the document in order to try to figure out from other dated events which calendar was in use.  Pre-1752, First Month was March, Second Month was April, Third Month was May, Fourth Month was June, Fifth Month was July, Sixth Month was August, Seventh Month was September, Eighth Month was October, Ninth Month was November, Tenth Month was December, Eleventh Month was January, and Twelfth Month was February. Starting in 1752, First Month refers to January, Second Month refers to February, Third Month refers to March, and so on. Fortunately, Rebecca Borden has done a handy chart for converting Quaker months to English months before and after 1752 (Julian & Gregorian calendars) and put it both on her own blog and as a post for the ancestry.com blog: Quaker Calendars and Dates: In Just Two Days, Tomorrow Will Be Yesterday. I printed it off and have used it so much in researching this branch of my tree!

In the course of writing my upcoming blog posts, where it is relevant, I will use the converted dates and put the dates as they are written in the original record in brackets immediately afterward, in an effort to make sure the story is clear and to reflect the original record.

Thanks for hanging in with me throughout this explanation. I hope you found it as interesting as I have (but not as frustrating).

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http://libguides.ctstatelibrary.org/hg/colonialresearch/calendar ; https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51370/why-our-calendars-skipped-11-days-1752 ; https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Give-us-our-eleven-days/ ; https://www.history.com/news/6-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-gregorian-calendar ; http://www.genealogyintime.com/GenealogyResources/Articles/understanding_julian_calendars_and_gregorian_calendars_in_genealogy_page1.html  ; https://www.historytoday.com/archive/gregorian-calendar-adopted-england  ; http://corsairsandcaptivesblog.com/dates-and-dating-julian-and-gregorian-calendars/ ; https://www.genealogyblog.com/?p=18500 ; https://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2016/01/19/a-date-is-a-date-is-a-date-is-a-date/ ; https://www.swarthmore.edu/friends-historical-library/quaker-calendar ;  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar