died in Vancouver 1946

[HughC]

According to the family bible, Robert James Casement d. 13 June 1946.
The British Columbia archives and the National Archives of Canada say 15 July.

I never trust a statistic I haven't forged myself. 
Does anyone have access to newspaper announcements that might clinch it?
He's not in the London Times, but possibly another British paper and I would have thought a Vancouver paper.  Are any indexed and on line?

[polarbear]

The record info available for BC Death Registrations at familysearch.org also includes his parents and spouse so this might help to clarify?

https://www.familysearch.org/

Scroll down to US, Canada and Mexico then scroll down to British Columbia Death Registrations.

Polarbear

[HughC]

Thanks, polarbear, but I don't see how that helps.
If some scribe in the registry office wrote down the wrong date,
the error will have been propagated in all the secondary sources.

My thought was this: if a newspaper announcement of his death appeared in mid-June then the event is unlikely to have been a month later.
In fact there might have been a news item: he was said to have dropped dead on a tram.

Newspapers are by no means infallible, but their immediacy makes them perhaps more trustworthy than gravestone inscriptions and other records.

[Jacquie in Canada]

The records at Mountain View Cemetery give his date of death as 15 Jul 1945 as well:
http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/nonmarketoperations/mountainview/burials/ca.htm

Jacquie

[HughC]

Thanks, Jacquie!

Clever of you to find that.  By a majority verdict, I think we have to decide that somebody back home misread the letter and made an incorrect entry in the family bible.  I can't quite understand why: it wasn't a case of the 5th day of the 23rd month, as North Americans perversely write today's date.

He seems to have been fond of mountains, in life as in death.  He put forward the name Mount Casement (50°17'N, 123°50'W) in memory of his parents.

[Jacquie in Canada]

I can't quite understand why: it wasn't a case of the 5th day of the 23rd month, as North Americans perversely write today's date.

It does seem that Americans prefer to use mm-dd-yy order but please don't assume that means Canadians prefer it as well. Most Canadian documents and forms I've filled out ask for dates in dd-mm-yy order. And if you look in random threads in the Canada forum you will see that most (if not all) of the Canadian posters give dates in that order as well.

Jacquie

[HughC]

Thanks for putting me right, Jacquie.

The only logical format is that used by astronomers, e.g. 2011 May 23.  After all, we didn't measure distances in inches feet and yards or our wealth in pence shillings and pounds.  But I suspect most of the world isn't quite ready for that.

In a posting on the Manx forum, Frances tells us that the ISO standard is 20110523.  I find that less satisfactory (though not quite as unsatisfactory as the standard of English in most ISO specifications).

I like your mountainous maple leaf, but shouldn't the caption be Canajan eh?

[Jacquie in Canada]

My apologies as well. I was tired and a little punchy when I wrote that (it was almost 3:00 a.m. here). One of this Canadians biggest peeves is when people lump Americans and Canadians together in generalizations.

BTW, I'm not going to deny that a lot of Canadians write out the date as month-day-year but when it's in strictly number format most I've seen do it day-month-year. One of the ways we are different from Americans is we have some hybrid customs that are a mixture of customs from our British colony days and the intrusion of the American culture via the mass media.

Jacquie

[majm]

Re #6 and format used by astronomers

Thanks for putting me right, Jacquie.

The only logical format is that used by astronomers, e.g. 2011 May 23.  After all, we didn't measure distances in inches feet and yards or our wealth in pence shillings and pounds.  But I suspect most of the world isn't quite ready for that.

In a posting on the Manx forum, Frances tells us that the ISO standard is 20110523.  I find that less satisfactory (though not quite as unsatisfactory as the standard of English in most ISO specifications).

I like your mountainous maple leaf, but shouldn't the caption be Canajan eh?

Info about the specific ISO standard is found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601,

As I understand it, that standard is not just used by astronomers,  it is probably a significant standard used in the Quality Assurance and Control standards for the manufacture of a number of communications products marketed to the masses... eg phones, hand held e-readers, blackberrys, etc and thus for tracking anyone via GPS or similar.... particularly handy in outback Australia for tracking people who may have needed to set off their personal emergency beacons and need rescuing by Emergency services... apparently the technology needed for expeditious mounting of rescue teams that is based on technology providing  the exact time and exact co-ordinates...  Probably similar to rescues at sea, or video transmissions from sole sailors making their way around the globe, or co-ordinating readings from buoys recording seismic activity for alerts to tsunami events.

Cheers,  JM