FamilyStory recognises a few different styles of dates and allows you to decide how you want dates formatted when displayed on your website.
Approximate dates
When a full date is not known, you can use an approximate date instead. These are mostly useful for an ancestor’s birth and death dates. There are a couple of different formats you can enter these dates in:
- If you only know the year, or only the month and year, just enter the portions you know – for example, “1873” or “January 1873”.
- If you have an approximate idea of the year, or the month and year, prefix the date with “Abt.” – for example, “Abt. 1873” or “Abt. January 1873”. This is commonly used for an ancestor’s birth date when only a baptism record has been found.
- If you’re unable to find a birth or death record for an ancestor, you can use a flourit date for their birth or death dates. Flourit dates indicate the period in which we know the ancestor was alive – for example, if you found a marriage record dated 1794, but no earlier records have been found, you could enter their birth date as “Fl. 1794”.
Full dates
Full dates include the day, month, and year. You generally won’t need to type a full date, as when uploading records you can use the date picker control, which will be formatted according to your computer’s regional settings. If writing a date out, it is recommended to write the month name as text (such as Jan or January). This avoids any confusion between the month and day portion of the date, which appear in different orders in US and European records, for example.
Display format
You can choose to have dates shown on your website in a variety of formats. Just visit the FamilyStory Settings page in WordPress to select your preferred format. This applies to any dates that are entered into specific date fields within records you upload to FamilyStory – dates you type out as text will remain formatted as you typed them.