When trying to enter a date such as 15 Jan 1579/80 the system doesn’t recognise it. However, if you added 15 Jan 1600/01 it’s fine. Double dating is needed for all dates between 1st Jan & 15th March until 1752 in the UK so a big problem when working with old records.
RM Help about Date formats mentions excluding those prior to 1583. Regardless, You can add the equivalent into the fact’s Sort Date (15 Jan 1580) and get the fact ordering properly, while preserving how You want that Date to show in reports.
Thanks for that but makes no sense why they treat those dates like that. Putting 15 Jan 1580 for sorting is still wrong, we should be able to add the dates correctly. If the system can handle double dates later in time it should earlier too.
Which is where the issue is, it’s wrong. The Julian calendar came in with the Romans so all dates before the change to the Gregorian Calendar need to be double dated. 1582 is when the Pope decided on the Gregorian Calendar so countries moved to the new calendar at various times. Here in the UK all dates prior to 1752 should be formatted as double dates.
No, they don’t need to be and should not be double dated. The Julian calendar was the primary calendar prior to the Gregorian calendar’s introduction. You are trying to go back and retroactively apply dates that didn’t ‘exist’ at the time. It makes absolute 0 sense to try and apply a calendar that did not exist.
Both Family Tree Maker and Family Historian correctly allow double dating it is only Rootsmagic which is creating an error after 1582. ALL DATES prior to when a country adopted the Gregorian Calendar should be shown either double dated or at least with an indicator like (J) to show that it is a date from the old calendar. People can chose to ignore this if you want to but Rootsmagic should have the ability to allow users to correctly format their dates if they wish.
This screen is from Family Tree Maker which shows the changeover date set in the database described as “Cutoff”, allows double dating prior to that.
This next screen shows correctly dated birth and an error for a incorrect death.
What you get when click on the error icon.
Family Historian have this in their setup for dates
It doesn’t pick up errors like FTM but adding the double dating shows like this when you click on it
If you want to show the date as the Julian calendar this is what you get
THIS IS AN ERROR AND SHOULD BE FIXED!
I prefer Rootsmagic over all the other packages and luckily don’t work with much data in this time period but I shouldn’t have to fix any output or put up with errors in the database because of badly interpreted information about the Julian & Gregorian calendars.
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