Entering Dates: Help

This page documents in detail how to enter the date of an event.

The basic date consists of a numeric day of the month, the name of a month, and a numeric year. The term "numeric" includes valid roman numerals. That is roman numerals may be used anywhere in a date that an arabic number may be used. For example "VI June MCMXLIV" and "VI/VI/MCMXLIV" are interpreted as "6 June 1944". The following table outlines the supported month names:

Name	#	Name	#	Name	#
Jan	1	Jany	1	January	1
Feb	2	Feby	2	February	2
Mar	3	March	3	Apr	4
Aprl	4	April	4	May	5
Jun	6	June	6	Jul	7
July	7	Aug	8	Augt	8
August	8	Sep	9	Sept	9
September	9	Oct	10	Octr	10
October	10	Nov	11	Novr	11
November	11	Dec	12	Decr	12
December	11
Vendémiaire	1 FRC	Vendemiaire	1 FRC	Brumaire	2 FRC
Frimaire	3 FRC	Nivôse	4 FRC	Nivose	4 FRC
Pluviôse	5 FRC	Pluviose	5 FRC	Ventôse	6 FRC
Ventose	6 FRC	Germinal	7 FRC	Floréal	8 FRC
Floreal	8 FRC	Prairial	9 FRC	Messidor	10 FRC
Thermidor	11 FRC	Fervidor	11 FRC	Fructidor	12 FRC

The three components of the date may be arranged in any order: day month year, month day year, year month day, and so on, as long as this does not make the date ambiguous. Ordinal suffixes can be appended to day numbers (with or without a space separator). Commas may be inserted where typically used. The date is ambiguous if the year might be confused with a day of the month because it is in the range 1 to 31. If the first part of the date is a number in this range then the date is assumed to be in the order day month year. So 12 July 28 is interpreted as the 12th of July 28 CE, not as the 28th of July 12 CE.

If you provide a month name from the French Republican calendar then The date is interpreted appropriately. Note that no abbreviations are supported for these month names, although optionally the accents may be omitted. The last date for which the French Republican Calendar was in legal force was 10 Nivôse XIV which was immediately followed by 1 January 1806. The application accepts higher year numbers, but the interpretation of the date is only a close approximation since we do not know when leap years would have been inserted after the 15th year of the calendar.

Parts of the date may be omitted for the obvious reason that they may be unknown. You can express a date as just the year or just the month and the year, or just the month and the day. "7 Feb" is the 7th of February in an unknown year, while "Feb 7" is sometime during the month of February in the year 7CE.

Vital statistics events registered in Britain and indexed on microfilm and through FreeBMD are generally only known by the quarter in which they were registered. Such a date should be entered as, for example: "1Q 1875" or "Q3 1856" and will be displayed as, for example, "in Q4 1887".

Alternatively a date may expressed using a numeric month in place of the name, by separating the components with slashes. This creates additional room for ambiguity. The date can be expressed as yyyy/mm/dd, dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy. If either the first or last number is greater than 31 it is assumed to be the year. If both of the first two numbers are less than or equal to 12, then the first number is assumed to be the day and the second the month, thus conforming to the date conventions of the majority of countries, although not of the USA. That is in almost every country on Earth 2/3/2013 is the 2nd of March 2013, but in the United States of America it is the 3rd of February 2013.

Qualifiers

A date can be qualified by a prefix. The following prefixes are supported:

Prefix	Interpretation
In	ordinary date
On	ordinary date
Abt	About
About	About
Cir	Circa
Circa	Circa
Bef	Before
Before	Before
Aft	After
After	After
Between	Between two dates
Bet	Between two dates
WFT EST	World Family Tree estimate
Est	Estimate
Cal	Calculated from age at event date
Calculated	Calculated from age at event date
From	From. May be followed by to second date.
To	To

If there is anything else before the date it will be saved and presented to users when the date is viewed. For example a date: "On the morning of the 6th of June 1944" will be correctly interpreted internally as 6 June 1944, but will be presented in all web pages in the exact form it was initially entered.

A date can be enclosed in angle brackets '<' and '>' to indicate that it is estimated. The date will be displayed with angle brackets around it.

A date may be marked as questionable by following it by a question mark '?'.

The epoch of the date can be expressed as a suffix at the end of the date:

BC	Before Christ
AD	Anno Domini the Year of Our Lord
CE	Common Era
BCE	Before the Common Era
AUC	ab Urbe ConditeSince the Founding of the City (of Rome)
OS	Old Style. This specifically refers to dates used in the British Empire, including its American colonies, up until 1752. In this period Britain continued to use the Julian Calendar with the year commencing on March 25th.
NS	New Style. This indicates explicitly that a date is in the Gregorian Calendar with the year starting on January 1st. This is the default for all dates on or after 15th October 1582.

Internally all dates are represented as day, month number, and year according to the Julian Proleptic Calendar for all dates up to 4 October 1582 and according to the Gregorian Calendar for all subsequent dates.

Ranges

You can build up more complex dates by combining two of the basic dates as described above in one of the following date phrases:

Between	date	and	date
Between	date	-	date
From	date	to	date
	date	-	date
	date	to	date
	date	or	date
	date	|	date