Person talk:Sarah Stearns (1)

Wrong death date [28 September 2008]

Source:Concord, Massachusetts, births, marriages, and deaths, 1635-1850, p. 120, "Sarah Wheeler the wife of Decon John Wheeler died December 29: 1727". The forward of this book says that the published records attempt to be an actual transcript, so one assumes this is the unadulterated old style date. Source:The Genealogical and encyclopedic history of the Wheeler family in America, p. 143 gives the date as 19 Dec 1727. It could be a simple typo, of course. But the ten-day discrepancy hints that somebody did a conversion from the old calendar to the modern calendar somewhere. Normally, one might expect the earlier of the two is the unadulterated date, but that comes from a secondary sources, while the other comes from a more primary source that claims to be an accurate transcript. So we are now left with a confusing ambiguity: which source changed the date and which date is correct?

In is my opinion it is wrong to alter the date so. First, since the default style is old style, if you are going to convert the date to new style, it is incumbent upon you to mark it n.s. so a reader does not misunderstand what you are saying, i.e., 19 Dec 1727, n.s. Second, even if you do this, you are just creating more work for the reader because most of the dates they work with will naturally be old style and you will be creating extra conversion work for them.

For that reason, it is my belief that the date should be presented as originally written as much as possible. If you want to, or have to, interpret it, it should be accompanied by a note making it very clear what was originally written and how you interpreted that. E.g. "The date was written '24 (6) 66'" when you input 24 Aug 1666 into WeRelate.

The one exception where I feel altering dates is useful is with dual years, though again adding an explanatory note will always reduce ambiguity. If you are reading a source, many times it is obvious from context that Jan. and Feb. are listed with the previous year when they actually belong to the following year (i.e., they follow December of the same year in a chronological list). So in this case, it is useful to provide the dual year when you present that date stripped of its surrounding context. Normally a reader would assume Jan. 1689 means Jan. 1690 (written Jan. 1689/90) because that was the default style of the time, but Jan. 1689/90 is very precise and unambiguous, so if you can determine this is the right date, I would suggest writing it this way.

--Jrich 20:47, 25 September 2008 (EDT)