Tuesday’s Tip – Determining Dates from Mentions in Newspaper Articles

madhattergenealogy@gmail.com

02 Feb 2016

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Determining Dates from Mentions in Newspaper Articles

Sometimes newspaper articles make reference to a date without actually stating the date. That can be frustrating when you need to enter an exact date into Legacy Family Tree. Here's a shortcut for finding the date.

I am sitting here working on my file. I am entering a funeral card for Heinrich Gläntzer. He died on 06 Feb 1896. It says that he was buried at 4pm on Sunday.

So what date was Sunday?

After I entered his death date and with my cursor still in the death field, I clicked the calendar icon (looks like a calendar page with a 6 on it).

I can then see that the Sunday after 06 Feb 1896 was 09 Feb. Since I had my cursor in a field that had a date, when I clicked the calendar icon it went to that month with the date highlighted so I didn't have to navigate through the calendar.

You can use this trick for any dates you need to determine! If you don't have an event date such a death notice, you can use the newspaper publish date as your starting point.

Find tech tips every day in the Facebook Legacy User Group. The group is free and is available to anyone with a Facebook account.

For video tech tips checkout the Legacy Quick Tips page. These short videos will make it easy for you to learn all sort of fun and interesting ways to look at your genealogy research.

Michele Simmons Lewis is part of the technical support team at Millennia, the makers of the Legacy Family Tree software program. With over 20 years of research experience, Michele’s passion is helping new genealogists get started on the right foot through her writings, classes and lectures. She is the former staff genealogist and weekly columnist for the McDuffie Mirror and now authors Ancestoring, a blog geared toward the beginner/intermediate researcher.

Comments (2)

Thanks for this interesting tip

I use the calendar, a bunch, a great feature of the program. I find it helpful, with tombstones that list the years, months and days, a person lived. Not always correct, but gives a calculated birth date, that is usually fairly close to the actual date. Also, when the census lists a child of “so many months” of age. I look at the top of the census sheet, get the date and take the number of months, into the calendar. This gives me another estimated date, but a much better date, then what the “report” lists.

DC
Di Christensen

9 years ago

Thanks for this interesting tip
CB
Cynthia Brewer Dooley

9 years ago

I use the calendar, a bunch, a great feature of the program. I find it helpful, with tombstones that list the years, months and days, a person lived. Not always correct, but gives a calculated birth date, that is usually fairly close to the actual date. Also, when the census lists a child of “so many months” of age. I look at the top of the census sheet, get the date and take the number of months, into the calendar. This gives me another estimated date, but a much better date, then what the “report” lists.