Can someone please tell me when the calendar for parish records changed ?

[hanes teulu]

 London Gazette, May 25 1751

Westminster 22 May. His Majesty came this Day to the House of Peers and gave His Royal Assent to the following Bills.viz
....
A Bill for regulating the Commencement of the Year and for correcting the Calendar now in Use
.....

[venelow]

Hi Rootschatters

In my experience, not every one was up to speed on this. Some parishes continued on the old calendar for quite a few years and the Bishop's Transcripts often continued to be written up the old way from Lady Day (25 March).

It is vital to look at the original records and work out which system they were following or make sure that any transcripts clearly make the distinction as to when the change took place. I know of of a parish in Yorkshire that did not make the change until 1780. I'm sure there were hold outs in other places also.

Venelow

[bungleberry]

Thank you all for your contributions on this, triggered by a query I encountered while trawling through GLS parish registers, scans of which are now available from ancestry. I still haven't resolved it, so have posted a thread on the GLS forum.

StevieSteve: unfortunately my FH package doesn't allow posting a date in the format you mention. It does, however, let you specify whether it was during the Julian or Gregorian era.

Guy: Yes, the parish register certainly confirms that the incumbent was using the Julian calendar. It was 1709, after all!

Cheers. 

[andrewalston]

Quaker records before 1752 (and quite a few after) tend to put comments in to clarify things.

They refer to months by number, so October is the eighth month, but were not happy with month names which referred to pagan gods or people. So "the fourth month known as July" might be used. Thus the reference to Julius Caesar would only be there because other people used it.

After the calendar changed, things settled down to match the rest of the country, but commonly without reference to month names at all. October became the tenth month, as we now expect.

[StevieSteve]

Hi, not sure if where you say FH, it stands specifically for Family Historian but if so, this is from the Help file

With the Gregorian calendar only you can optionally specify a year modifier - a 2-digit value in the second year field, following the ‘/’ character. Where a date is shown in this format (e.g. 1639/40), the year after the slash indicates the year as we think of it now (1640 in this case), and the year before the slash is the year as it would have been recorded at the time (1639 in this case). This way of writing dates is called double dating.

The year modifier, if supplied, should always be 2 digits, and one greater than the 2 digits before the slash character, or 00 if the last 2 digits before the slash character are 99 (e.g. 15 April 1699/00). For English and American dates, year modifiers are only applicable to years prior to 1752, and even then are only used for dates between 1 January and 24 March. The date 23rd November 1712 in England, for example, is not ambiguous, and therefore should not have a year modifier,

[JohninSussex]

Here is a clergyman's entry I found in a Kent parish register.  It follows the record of the baptism of Stephen Stephens on September 2nd: