Letitia "Tish" Richardson

A Note on Dates and Abbreviations

 

Dates

Genealogical dates can be confusing!

 

The Julian Calendar: Early colonists used the Julian calendar, which was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC.  The Julian calendar had a slight problem, which was that a small inaccuracy in it caused the calendar to "drift" over centuries and literally lose days.  By 1582 CE, the Julian calendar had drifted 10 days relative to the seasons, which was shifting Easter off its "seasonally appropriate" date.  The Catholic Church became concerned and decided to fix the calendar.

 

The Gregorian Calendar: Pope Gregorius XIII introduced a calendar reform in 1582 CE and so the new calendar is named after him.  To correct for the lost 10 days, the Church declared that Thursday, October 4, 1582 would be followed by Friday, October 15, 1582.  Voila, fixed!  This is the Gregorian calendar that we use today.

 

So why were New England colonists still using the Julian calendar?

Because England was a Protestant country and had no interest in adopting a Catholic calendar improvement.  Great Britain and her colonies used the Julian calendar until 1751.  Talk about stubborn…

 

Why does this matter?

It matters because historical and genealogical accuracy is important.  BUT there is a glitch.  Over time, historians, genealogists, and writers, even though striving for accuracy misread, misunderstood, and/or misstated dates.  People also mixed and matched the calendars, improperly using say, April 1, 1620 (Julian) interchangeably with April 1, 1620 (Gregorian) when they should be ten days off.  That makes striving for accuracy today even more difficult.

 

What's the solution for a genealogist?

Striving for accuracy is important.  That said, and with apologies to historians everywhere, my writing likely has dating mistakes.  Whenever possible, I try to recognize that the source of my information may have been using a different calendar, and I try to correct for that.  I also want to engage my readers and having a lot of date technicality seems like a sure turn-off if I'm not writing for academics.  So, I try to balance accuracy with accessibility.

 

More Info: 

If you'd like more information on the topic, check out this blog post by Tamura Jones: https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2020/07/mayflower-myths-2020/

 

Glitch Number Two:

As if fixing drift weren't enough of a headache, the Gregorian calendar also started on January 1st.  Yet again, England figured that if the Catholic Church was for it, England would stand firm against it.  The English continued to use March 25th as the first day of the new year.  March was called the first month.  In dating events, anything occurring before March 25th had a double year.  So, any date between January 1st and March 25th would say, for example, 1 January 1647/8 and 24 March 1647/48.  Only on March 25th would you write 25 March 1648. 

 

But it gets worse!  Sometimes people would date something as "the 5th day of the 11th month".  This meant February 5, 1647.

 

Our historical records are filled with wonky dates such as these.

 

How does this affect our family history?

A perfect example concerns the death dates of John Dwight and his second wife, Elizabeth.  Elizabeth threw herself down a well, committing the unforgiveable sin of suicide.  This had contemporary New England in a tizzy, and it presents a peculiar conundrum for us because it's hard to tell if she did this before or after John died.  The difference is stark.  If she did it after he died, well, we can imagine she was a distraught widow and feel sympathy toward her.  If she did it before, we're left with the question of "why" to which there are no easy answers.  Complicating things, John's will treated her a wee bit harshly.  Hmmm, happy marriage?  Methinks not!

 

Abbreviations

Commonly used genealogical abbreviations:

~          about

b.         born

bp.       baptized

bro.      brother

bur.      buried

c.         circa

d.         died

dau.     daughter

fa.        father

m.        married

mo.      Mother

NFR    no further record

rem.     removed (moved to)

sis.       Sister

unk.     unknown

unm.    Unmarried

 

Colony abbreviations:

CC                  Connecticut Colony

MD                 Maryland Colony

L.I.                 Long Island (disputed between the Dutch and the English colonies)

MBC               Massachusetts Bay Colony

NHC               New Haven Colony

NJC                New Jersey Colony

NY                 New York Colony

Penn. Col.       Pennsylvania Colony

PC                  Plymouth Colony

RI                  Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations

VC                 Virginia Colony

WC                Wessagusett Colony

From Inspiration to Action

February 10, 2023

 

In 2013, inspired by rumors that my husband's family had some really fascinating American ancestry and further motivated by a nagging sense that family history, once lost, cannot be recovered, I decided to research the family genealogy. 

My interest in the topic dates to 1987 when we moved to New England.  As transplanted Californians, my husband and I were often surprised when New Englanders, asked about our ancestry.  In California, the land of new and shiny, that topic never arose.  We were even more surprised when people, hearing that my husband's mother was a Dwight, nodded with interest and said that they might have Dwight ancestry as well.  It didn't hurt that Dave's uncle, John Dwight, was a larger-than-life character in Vermont's Champlain Valley, where we lived.  Nonetheless, it seemed like there was something else going on.  Twenty-five years later, I finally had the time to investigate.

Like most people, when I started my research, I signed up for ancestry.com and enthusiastically began studying the resources there and creating a family tree.  I should mention that there are several other sites like ancestry.com that offer similar services.  I use ancestry.com here as a stand-in for all of them.  These sites are wonderful ways to get started, but there is one big caveat. 

A Note on Crowd-sourced Research Sites

Sites such as ancestry.com offer a lot of valuable sources of information.  Unfortunately, my experience is that most people use the least reliable of their offerings.  These are the family trees that other people have published on the site and make available to users.  This is obviously a generous thing to do so I feel a bit guilty about what I'm about to write, but here goes.  The problem with using other people's research is that you are trusting that they are good researchers and thoughtful about what they publish.  Sometimes, however, people are sloppy researchers and don't verify the information they include in their own trees.  I learned this the hard way when I researched generations of one woman's history only to finally realize that she was a second wife and would have been about 5 years old when our ancestor was born!  Our ancestor was therefore a child of the first wife, and I had to throw all of the research on the second wife's ancestors away.  The person who included the second wife as the mother of our shared ancestor was a sloppy researcher and had not noticed or questioned the rather jarring age discrepancy.  This was a frustrating experience for me because I really wanted to uncover an accurate historical record of the family.  Luckily, it happened early on in my research, and it effectively scared me into seeking out better vetted resources.   

Ok, I'm a Research Nerd

Thankfully, such resources abound and include the New England Genealogical and Historical Society, The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, The American Genealogist, and various other scholarly journals and periodicals, history books, as well as church and society records.   Colony and town records also help and can be found among the larger databases listed at the beginning of this paragraph.  Local libraries and State databases are also quite helpful.  Many of these organizations require a nominal annual membership fee, but the access to verified data and extensive resources is well worth the price.  This kind of research is more time-consuming than clicking away on ancestry.com but again, if you want unimpeachable sources, this is the way to go. 

But Back to Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com and similar sites can still be useful to anyone who wants to research their genealogy.  You just have to be careful.  If you want to learn about your ancestors and don't feel like going the academic route, you can safely use these sites by verifying the sources that people use to substantiate their claims.  Always click on the icon for "sources" when you're looking at information in someone else's family tree.  If there are no sources or if the sources seem sketchy (the source for a Massachusetts-born ancestor's birth record is a link to a site in Ohio, for example) then keep looking until you find a more reliable tree.  Don't let one person's lazy "research" mess up your own.  Happy hunting!

 

The more I got into it, the more I wanted to ensure that my findings were accurate, so I sought and received verification of my findings from established organizations such as the Mayflower Society and the New England Historical Society.  As I gained proficiency in my new role, my earliest notes, scribbled on scraps of paper, were replaced by hand-written ancestor charts.  As the information ballooned, threatening to overwhelm my attempts at organizing it, I began using colored index cards for each married couple in the ancestral tree, where I could add details and cite sources.  Eventually, my research turned up 800+ ancestors and took over five years to complete.  To be honest, I'm still tying up loose ends even now!  Read my next post to see how it all started.