What Date Guessing strategies do you use?

Question

When you don't know when someone is born, or when they died, what strategies do you use for guessing dates (assuming no other sources can be found)?

I work from a known date of a relative and add or subtract.  I use 25 years +/- when working up and down generations, and I use +/- 2 years when working through siblings.  If I know a child is the eldest, I use 20 years as the starting point.  I guess the spouses birth date same as the husband's when I don't know it.

So say I know John Jones Sr. was born in 1800 with certainty, I guess his wife is born 1800 as well, I guess his father is born 1775, I guess his kids born 1820 on up.

Just curious to see if anyone had a book of tricks that they use to guess dates that they would be willing to share.

Comments

If all I have is a marriage, depending on the era and the location, I may use as little as 12 years up.  My reason is that I have ancestors who married before the age of 14 years (her -- I think she was 12, and I think he was 16), even though they did not have any children until she was 15, or 16, or so.  And we weren't even nobility who married their kids off in their cradles!  Peasants the lot of us! 

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12 years is pretty unlikely for a mother, and it's definitely the exception even for marriage. 15 years is about the minimum for a successful live birth.

My family is mostly farmers too, Ohio, West Virginia, etc, and most got married in early 20's.

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I don't use estimated date templates for that kind of guesstimate, but I DO use it for searching for records .. especially as dates are rather haphazardly recorded at times.  And girls younger than 10 have survived childbirth, with living offspring, so I think 12 is fair enough.

Ever read the history of some of the English royals and the noble houses?  The ages of some of those "brides" was ridiculous.

And don't forget cultures other than "western", where girls are STLL married off as young as 10 or 11, depending on when menses commences for them.  Some of them even survive their childbed "experiences".

Answer 1

If I put in an estimated date, its generally because I have a pretty good feel for what the proper date is, based on a number of factors:

1) Sources: it's amazing that someone can be born in 1864, 1869, 1870, 1872, and 1874 on multiple different sources, and even more irritating is that they could all be wrong. I try to logically walk through the dates, why they're there, how reliable they are, etc. and come up with the best possible guesstimate.

2) Historical/Legal: The time period, the norms of the day related to marriage and children, and even the legal age for marriage, although sometimes they used to fudge the dates a bit to even fit within these.

3) Economic factors: In hard times, especially in an agrarian economy, it paid to have lots of babies as early as possible. Remember, "Many hands make work light".

4) Familial patterns: If the parents married early and/or grandparents married early, then there's a pattern in place for the children to follow

So weighing all these, I will sometimes merit a best guess. Generally that means going back 15-25 years from the date of marriage to estimate a date of birth. Note that there's a template (I think it's {{Estimated Dates}} ) that you should consider using if you do this, so that it puts a big warning on the profile that reminds you that you don't have a good source record in place to determine date of birth.

Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but it's typically how I try to figure things out.

Answer 2

I try not to make such estimates. The average age at marriage at the end of the 18th C in England was about 28 years for men and 26 years for women. Far higher than most people estimate. That  being said very many had their first child 10 or more years earlier or later.  On  wiki tree, I have seen examples of  where estimates have  a knock on effect upon ancestors backwards  and cousins sideways  as each one is estimated in line with the first estimate. It can result in huge discrepancies in earlier generations. A twenty or  thirty year or more discrepancy and  a whole generation is soon arrived at. When a real date is encountered/discovered it causes multiple problems.

I'd prefer to leave unknown dates, unknown.

Comments

When entering a new profile, you are required to have an estimated date of birth, and this is very helpful when people are doing searches or eliminating potential merges. Even if it's not exact, you can usually be within 10 - 20 years and that eliminates the number of potential matches a person needs to look at.  Just be sure to mark the "uncertain" button.

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Or death - you can make a valid profile with either. And upon occasion I've had a reasonable death date and no birth date.