[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Re: September 31 ????

[Karl Krueger]

Robert did a great job describing how we get the offset between Julian vs Gregorian calendars. A Russian had explained this all to me before. I'm glad the topic came up for discusssion because this piece of detail seems important for all of us understand the basis for the difference. The overall reason is that the Gregorian calendar is really a refinement of the Julian calendar and hence is more exact with keeping pace of the true year - so really the Julian calendar is running slowly behind astronomical timing by not leaving out Feb 29 every 100 years except for those divisible by 400.
 
To answer Rose's question - the major part of my grandfather's story occurs in 1908-09 hence I find a good 13 day relationship between our calendar and his Dates - confirmed with days of the week. 
 
Right now I think no one used Sept 31 except for the days before Christ before Ceasar Augustus wanted his month to have the maximum number of days. So my feeling is I am dealing with two different people making simple mistakes.

Robert Radke <rradke at telus.net> wrote:
This doesn't answer the original question, but perhaps some folk will be 
interested. 

The reason that the Gregorian calendar falls one day further behind the Julian 
calendar each century is because the Gregorian calendar omits leap years in 
years divisible by 100, but the Julian calendar does not. Thus, once every 
100 years, the Julian calendar has one extra day.

There is one exception to this rule, and it happened in recent memory. In 
years divisible by 400, the Gregorian calendar keeps its leap year. So in 
the year 2000 just past, both calendars had a leap year. The two calendars 
thus continue to differ by just 13 days even though we're in a new century.

So for our Orthodox friends who have just finished celebrating Christmas 
according to the Julian calendar, the date of Christmas didn't shift by one 
day this century as it did at the turn of the last century.

--Bob Radke

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