According to Google Analytics my most "hit upon" posting is the royal line of Anne (Skipwith) (Goforth) Oxley. Of the literally hundreds of people who have visited the posting, only one was smart enough to see an error and brave enough to tell me about it.
Anne's death date is given as February 3, 1723 in George Tuttle Goforth's, The Goforth Genealogy (Annandale, Va.: the author, 1981, 3rd edition), p. 1. Since Anne was a Quaker and died in Philadelphia, I assumed her death record came from William Wade Hinshaw's six volume Encyclopedia of Quaker Genealogy. This indeed was the case and that was the source I cited in the posting. Hinshaw gives the date as 2-3-1723. When I first saw the date I knew that Goforth was wrong. I used the Quaker dating system of day-month-year and entered the date as 2 May 1723. However, I then saw that Anne's second husband, William Oxley also died in Philadelphia and Goforth noted that death as February 15, 1717. Hinshaw gave the date as 2-15-1717. Well, that caught my eye, since there is no 15th month. Hinshaw had flipped the day and month (so I thought). Did he also modernize the date? Not caring very much (and I'll be honest, I'm never that specifically careful with Michael's ancestry as opposed to my own, and I am also less careful while researching for fun as opposed to researching for writing an article), I entered the dates as February and thus they appeared in the blog posting.
Well, Philadelphia Quakers did not log dates as New England Quakers. Here's two examples of New England Quaker Dates from Dover, N.H. and Salem, Mass., the two meetings with which I am most familiar:
Here in the transcription in the New Hampshire Genealogical Record, the first original record is given in Quaker dating, but the subsequent transcriptions all invert the dates for clarity's sake.
Always day, month, year. So I asked several people if they knew if Hinshaw had modernized his dates. No one knew. So I had to use the exception clause to my primary source/derivative source rule and write away for the actual records. The great people at Swarthmore sent me the records quickly and cheaply ($5.00--what a bargain!). The records will be my next posting. And sure enough the records are all month-day-year. So, the actual dates of death of Anne is 3 April 1723 and William is 15 April 1717.
Nowhere in Hinshaw's introduction does he state explicitly how he transcribed dates. This is a failure on his part. He takes great pains at explaining Quaker dates (the first month is March) and New Style v. Old Style to take into account the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. However, he never says that his transcriptions are verbatim, which would have been helpful. However, his records, which are primary are also derivative, so you can always look at the originals to see what's what. So problem solved.
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