While genealogists often strive to obtain the exact dates of events such as births, marriages, and deaths, sometimes an exact date is elusive and you have to do the best that you can to estimate the date on which an event likely took place. It is worth trying to estimate dates, as it will serve as a reminder that you are still looking for clues as to an exact date. It will also notify future family history researchers that you tries to locate the exact date but you could not. Perhaps they can pick up where you left off and find that elusive date certain.
In trying to estimate dates, a genealogist will examine as many resources as he or she can get his or her hands on in an effort to pinpoint the date as closely as possible. Census records, probate records, and military service records can provide helpful clues as can marriage licenses and records regarding other family members such as birth records of siblings. In order to illustrate how these resources can be used to approximate dates, I will provide a hypothetical scenario that show how it works.
Let’s say that you are looking for the birth date of a child of a married couple that was living in the United States during the eighteenth century. There have been numerous studies that show that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, couples usually bore children two years apart. This may seem like a bit of a stretch, but it is only a starting point. If the hypothetical couple had three children and you know that the first was born in 1842, then the siblings were more than likely born in 1846 and 1848. Since those dates are only approximations, you can check them against data from the census. If you check the 1850 census and find that the children may have been born in different years than you had originally estimated, check the 1860 census to see if the ages are consistent or if the census taker may have made a mistake. Either way, you may be able to come up with a year of birth or a small range of years within which each individual child could have been born.
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