[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Format for Dates

[Rose Ingram]

I'm sure we all get the gist of the matter now.  :-)

I think the most important thing to is to spell out or abbreviate the month 
when writing a date when inputting into our genealogy programs or paper 
work, as has been suggested.  Whether it be year, month and day  or vice 
versa.   This method will avoid errors being made or incorrect assumptions 
by made by others with whom you may share your genealogy with.

Happy Ancestor Hunting,
Rose Ingram

From: "Sig Matt"
> Earl and all others,
>
>  Add one more strong vote to standardize the recording of dates.
>  I see nothing but positive results from a universal standard form of 
> recording dates.
>  I would be interested to hear opinions from the experts on the subject, 
> especially on the negative side.
>  Also a related question, how did it come about that in the case of 
> numerals the standardization was much more widespread?
>
>  Having been born in 1930, in my lifetime I have had the good fortune (or 
> misfortune, depending on your point of view) to have lived under 4 
> distinctly different political systems. Each with it's own rules, customs, 
> habits and preferences, including the recording of dates.
>  So I too must make little side calculations every time I read, write or 
> handle overseas correspondence or documents etc.
>  Standardizing the recording of dates would be simpler and beneficial for 
> everyone involved.
>
>  One instance comes to mind, in recent years a lack of standardization in 
> measurements in Science caused a monumental failure of a US Space Probe 
> that had traveled into space for several years, I believe. Then, when 
> approaching the distant planet, the soft landing procedure failed causing 
> the destruction of the probe in the resulting crash-landing.
>  The reported cause was said to be confusion of measurement units between 
> the metric and conventional systems in calculating the braking force.
>
>  Let's move toward standardization  (yyyy mm dd)
>
>  Sig Matt
>
> "Earl.Schultz" <Earl.Schultz at telusplanet.net> wrote:
>  There seems to be some confusion regarding my original suggestion that we
> standardize writing of dates and I did not want to continue the discussion
> because I know we are all attached to the way we learned to write dates.
> However, I would like to clarify what I had suggested.
>
> There is nothing wrong with using dates such as October 3, 2006 or 3 
> October
> 2006. The dates are clear and I suggest that everyone use what they are
> comfortable with using.
>
> However, if dates are written as numbers only such as 03/10/06 or 10/03/06 
> I
> suggested that we abandon the US and the UK/Canadian past practices and
> adopt the International Standard of yy/mm/dd. Only if we all use the same
> standard will numerical dates be readable to all. We can argue to keep our
> preferred method but you can guarantee that the date will be unreadable to
> some people and that is not what we try to do in this fun hobby of ours.
> Some genealogical societies have already had that debate and have selected
> the international standard; our Canadian government is mixed in its use of
> it; and even our new high security cheques give a choice in the date 
> format.
> My suggestion only referred to numerically written dates.
>
> One very big advantage of this numerical format is that if you name your
> files with this date format they will be in chronological order on your
> computer. Consider filing your copies of the SGGEE Journal as 122004
> Journal, 032005 Journal, or Dec2004 Journal and Mar2005 Journal etc. and 
> the
> Journals will be filed alphabetically or numerically by month but will be
> more difficult to find specific issues. But if you name your files 200412
> Journal and 2005Mar Journal all Journals will be filed chronologically 
> with
> the most recent last in your list. This is a strong advantage if you have 
> a
> large number of time dependent files. Incidentally, I file my copies of 
> the
> Journal by vol # and issue #, with the date, which accomplishes the same
> thing.
>
> Sorry for not being clear on my first raising of this issue but I was
> responding to someone who raised the problem of trying to read numbered
> dates on genealogical notes received from someone else. The problem does
> exist and I didn't want to ignore it when a solution is available.
>
> Earl Schultz
> ------------------------------