As my mother, an avid genealogist, taught me when I was young: every person needs a name, a date and a place. I touched on names here, and places here, so today’s contribution is about dates.

How dates were recorded on documents was a function of what kind of record was being kept, what kind of authority was keeping the record, and the cultural and legal norms governing the record keeping and where the records would be sent. A wide range of styles are apparent across times and places. It is important to understand different date conventions, but equally important to be consistent in keeping track of your own genealogical records.

In the US, it is common to write Month, Day, Year, either with a word for the month (June 4, 2026) or as numbers (6/4/2026). In Europe, there are many conventions, but the most common today is Day Month Year, either with a word for the Month (4 June 2026) or as numbers (4.6.2026).

Whatever system you use, never use only numbers on the genealogical forms! Do you see how confusing only numbers can be? Does 6/4 mean June 4 or 6 April?

You do not want to record lots of research only to be unable to remember later whether the birthdate was April or June.

Both FamilySearch and Ancestry require standardized dates which include the month in words, as follows: 4 June 2026. FamilySearch uses a “standardized” date for its search algorithms. Ancestry requires a truncated date with only the first three letters of the month (4 Jun or 6 April). When using the Ancestry mobile application, it coaches you to enter exactly in this format. With FamilySearch, either the website or the mobile application will want you to choose the “standardized” date option. Just take the time to do that as you go along. Otherwise you get unhappy error messages. See this video tutorial if you need help, or this page of explanantion.

We often do not know the precise date when adding a person to the tree. FamilySearch and Ancestry, along with other major platforms, recognizes the need to start somewhere. You may enter in just a year if you know the year but not a month or day (for example from a census record). You may also add about, before, or after, to an estimated year. You can estimate a mother or father was born at least 20 years from a child’s birth, but that has to be marked “est” or “about,” since a woman could be between 16-50 and have a child, with an even wider age range for a man to father a child.

In 1804, the French Civil Code was established during the reign of Napoleon. Among other things, it prescribed a set form for a civil record for births, marriages and deaths. This style was handwritten in a paragraph, or typed as a paragraph with blanks for specific names and dates. See examples here. This style included dates written out entirely in words, such in “the fourth day of the month of June of the year two thousand and twenty six.”

Oh, but my ancestors are not from France, you might say. Well, Napoleon ruled over a lot of other regions as well, and so this form became adopted in many other countries as well. Not only France, but also Italy, parts of the later German empire, and the Russian partition of Poland, to name but a few places, adopted this new style of civil record, which then spread to other places, giving many places in Europe a consistent “look” to the records.

This means of course, that you have to get good at deciphering numbers as written by words, usually in the genitive case or as an ordinal number. Don’t worry! The FamilyHistory Library in Salt Lake City put together genealogical word lists for many languages which show numbers written in the style most likely to appear in historical vital records. These were once upon a time printed out and sent to FamilySearch Centers, but nowadays are available online on FamilySearch (you need a free account to log in and see them). So, if you do not speak or read French, German, Polish, Italian, Latin, Hungarian, or Russian, you can follow the links to the page about that language. If you need a different language, go to the FamilySearch Research Wiki and search for the language name genealogical word list.