SATURDAY NIGHT GENEALOGICAL FUN - IT'S A DATE!

It's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun again(or in my case, Early Sunday Morning
Genealogy Fun) at Randy Seaver's Genea-Amusings blog and this week it's all about
dates:

1) Open your genealogy software program and search for a "Date Calculator."
You could go exploring in your Tools or Options menu, or you could use the
Help menu to find it.

2) Open the "Date Calculator" and put in a death date for one of your ancestors
and put in an age at death (use the one you know, or just make one up - we're just
testing this feature today). Do the same thing by entering a birth date and a death
date in the "Date Calculator" and see how old someone was when they died.

3) Tell us what software you're using and where you found the "Date Calculator."
Tell us the information you found out from using the "Date Calculator."

I have been using Personal Ancestry File for years and have been trying out
the free download trial version of RootsMagic4 so I thought I'd use both for
this one!

I first went to my PAF program and decided on using my 3x great grandmother
Rachel Barrows as my example. I found the Date Calculator on the drop down
"Tools" list. PAF only calculates "date to date" so I entered Rachel's birth date of
8/3/1795 and her death date of 5/9/1832.(Dates are entered in this format for the
PAF calculator). I hit "calculate" and found that Rachel Barrows was 36 years,
9 months, and 6 days old when she died. I then changed the second date to 4/26/2009
and had Rachel survived she'd be 213 years, 8 months and 23 days old!

I don't have any ancestor's death certificates so for RootsMagic I decided to calculate
how old Rachel Barrows' husband John Ellingwood Jr. would be today if he were still
living. The Date Calculator again was on the drop down "Tools" list. In RootsMagic,
the dates are entered as "12 Jun 1798" for birth and then "26 Apr 2009" for today, So had
John somehow become immortal, he'd be 210 years, 10 months and 14 days old today.
That's a LOT of candles on the birthday cake!

Just for fun I entered the date for John and Rachel's marriage. They were married on 28
Oct 1819 and so I entered that into the first box, leaving today's date in the second box.
It turns out they'd have been married 189 years, 5 months and 29 days as of today.

Finally, I noticed that Rachel was older than John when they married. How old? Well,
2 years, 10 months, and 9 days older!

But who's counting?