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The Mystery of the Three Birth Dates
Just before Christmas, I received a message from Maggie in New York:
"Hi Mike, I've been researching my great-grandmother who emigrated from Cork in 1871. Family notes say she was born on March 15, 1850, but when I found her baptism record, it shows March 3, 1850. Then I found her on a US census, and the age given there would put her birth year at 1849! I'm starting to think I have three different women. Please help!
Maggie."
Ah Maggie, you don't have three different women, but one very typical Irish ancestor. Let me explain what I mean.
The Day I Understood
When I first researched my own Collins line, a family note told me my great-grandmother Collins was born in 1859. No day or month was given - just a year, written in careful but fading ink.
At the time is was a solid lead - a good base from which to proceed.
Then I found her baptism record — which gave a date several years later than the year in the hand written note suggested!
The 1901 Irish census provided another birth year, while the 1911 census drifted again. To round things off, her marriage record gave a different age altogether, while her death certificate, filled out decades later by a family member who never knew her as a young woman, displayed something else again.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table with these documents in front of me, feeling like I was looking at a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from different boxes.
The breakthrough came over a pint at our local pub with an Uncle. I mentioned my frustration with all the conflicting dates.
He laughed.
"Mike, do you know when I was born?"
"July 14, 1936," I said.
"That's when I celebrate my birthday," he replied. "But my mother always swore I was born just after midnight on the 15th. She told me that the midwife looked at her watch and wrote down the 14th because she'd been there since early evening and couldn't be bothered with the paperwork of a new day." He took a sip of his Guinness. "And you know what? It doesn't matter."
That's when the penny dropped for me.
I was thinking like a 21st-century person with instant access to official records. But even though civil birth registration arrived in Ireland in 1864, most rural families continued to rely on memory, parish records, and oral knowledge. It was a very different world from ours.
The World When Dates Were Flexible
Picture rural West Cork in the late 1850s. My great-grandmother Collins is born on a small farm in the middle of the night. Thankfully, the baby arrives healthy.
A few days pass or maybe longer. Life on the farm continues, cows need milking, turf needs cutting, neighbours call in. When would they have gone to the church for the baptism? When the mother felt strong enough. When the weather allowed? When they could spare the cart?
The baptism happens when it's convenient. That's the date the priest writes in his register, because that's the day he performed the sacrament. Birth date? The parents might have said "a fortnight ago" or "around the last full moon." The priest wrote what he knew for certain.
A few years later, civil registration finally arrives, but many families simply carry on as they always did, relying on memory rather than paperwork.
Fast forward to 1901. A census enumerator arrives at the door.
"Age?" he asks.
Does she know her exact age? She may never have celebrated a birthday in the modern sense. Someone in the house might call out, "She's in her forties, near enough." The enumerator writes it down. If she's actually forty-two and a half, it doesn't matter much until a genealogist a century later starts reverse-engineering birth years.
And by 1911 there was another complication. The Old Age Pension had been introduced a few years earlier, payable from age seventy. Suddenly age mattered in a way it never had before. Some people genuinely didn't know their exact birth year. Others quietly added a year or two to qualify for the pension. That's why many families appear to age faster between 1901 and 1911 Irish census than the calendar allows.
The Immigration Complication
Maggie, your great-grandmother faced the same fog of memory but then had immigration added to the mix.
When she arrived in America in 1871, someone asked her age.
She might have rounded it up or down.
She might have guessed.
She might simply have repeated what she'd always been told at home.
If she left Ireland young, without ever handling a birth certificate, knowing only that she was "born around 1850, give or take," then it's hardly surprising that her age drifted across later records.
I've traced families where the same person gives a different age in every American census, with each one written there in a confident black ink.
The Gift of Approximation
Here's what years of research have taught me: sometimes "approximate truth" (or as we say in Ireland, "there or therabouts") is the most honest truth we can reach.
When I tell the story of my great-grandmother Collins, I don't pretend I know the exact day she was born in 1859. What I know is that she grew up in post-Famine rural Cork, worked hard, raised her family, and lived a full and long life. That's the story that matters.
Maggie's great-grandmother left Cork in 1871 at about twenty-one years of age. That's solid enough to understand her life and her choices.
So, I suggest that you make a note in your research file:
Born early 1850 (probably late February or early March), baptised March 3, 1850.
That's honest, accurate, and enough for now.
Then turn towards the richer (and I believe the more interesting) questions:
Why did she leave? Where did she settle and why there? How did she feel as the world changed around her?
I suggest that those stories (real and imagined) will reward you far more than chasing a single elusive date.
How about the rest of our readers? Have you encountered "drifting" birth dates in your own research? Do HIT REPLY to share your own experiences.
That's it for this week.
Slán for now,
Mike |