This particular brand of double-dating presented itself in my family history software when it refused to accept a date of 15 Feb 1733. The software kept insisting the date should be 15 Feb 1732/33.

Wuzzup wit dat? I deleted 32/33, tried again. Same result. I tried all fourteen different ways to delete and correct a date, to no avail.

When all else failed, ‘cuz that’s the way I do things ’round here, I decided to try the Help files. (Props to you if you already know the answer here, it took me a good long while to figure it out.) Seems there’s a difference of opinion between the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

Julius Caesar, after consulting with his chief astronomer, came up with a pretty durn good calendar in 46 B.C. It had 365 days and added a leap day every four years. Problem was, it was off… by just a few minutes. By the time Pope Gregory XIII (Thirteen, to his friends) noticed in 1582, the Julian calendar was off by several days.

So the Pope set things straight in 1582, but true to form, it took the Britain and American colonies until 1752 to get up to speed. By then, the Julian calendar was off by eleven days. Further complicating matters, the Julian calendar started on March 25th, not New Year’s Day.

So, here’s where it gets nasty. A good many countries adopted the Gregorian calendar right away. And as British and American record keepers began to feel more and more self-conscious about their old calendar, some of them started converting to the new Gregorian calendar before it was mandated. That’s problem number one.

Problem number two, is that anything that happened, for example, in January, February, or the first 25 days of March of 1733 on the old calendar actually happened in 1732 on the new one. Thus the reason my family history software insisted on double-dating my ancestor. This kind of double-dating went on for nearly two centuries.

And you thought Y2K was a pain?

The Mitchell Papers

Because Family Tree Maker connects directly to Ancestry.com and uses any information you’ve added on an individual to go find that individual in other family trees, I occasionally click the “Web Search Resources” button. In this case, I was looking for info on Luzanna Leonard, daughter of Daniel and Lucretia (Jennings) Leonard, who stayed in Pennsylvania with her aging mother while Lucretia’s only son William and most of his family moved to Ohio.

Turns out Luzanna married a David Mitchell after everyone cleared out and that David Mitchell is a distant ancestor of one Jerry Zollars. Yes, that Zollars family, of Zollarsville fame. Jerry had a family tree on Ancestry and the good sense to include an email address where I could reach him. We carried on quite the digital conversation.

To make a long story short… (too late?)… Jerry had recently received four storage containers full of Mitchell family history from a Mitchell widow, including one entire binder on the Leonards. Seems the Mitchells and the Leonards liked each other very much. They intermarried at least four times and probably more. But Jerry had, in turn, delivered the material to a Mitchell family member in Irving, Texas.

Tracking that Mitchell down was easy enough, and he was kind enough to ship the Leonard binder to me, provided I promised to ship it back when I was finished reviewing it. Done deal.

Wow! That’s all I can say about William C. “Bill” Mitchell’s research. It spanned several decades, dozens of families, and he was meticulous about citing his sources. There is some evidence he may have even corresponded with Jennie Leonard Hutchinson before her death. Bill did fall victim to an erroneous biography that said Lot Leonard descended from Henry Leonard rather than Solomon, but over all, the binder spot on.

Among the new leads I picked up for future followup… 1) Caleb Jr. left a will in Washington County Orphan’s Court (none of us had ever thought to look there), 2) Luzanna left a will in Uniontown, Fayette County (who would expect a will, let alone in the “wrong” county?), and 3) Caleb Jr., Silas, and Abner all signed a petition seeking an independent state of Westsylvania.

Oh, and two of the Burt sisters (who married Leonards and Mitchellls respectively) died of typhoid within hours of each other and were buried in the same grave. I know. Macabre.

William inspired me to go out and buy a copy of Lecky’s The Tenmile Country and its Pioneer Families on Ebay… and puzzled me with a reference to source material called the “Horn Papers.” It sounded vaguely familiar, though I had never cited that source, so I did what every good researcher does and Googled it. Turns out the “Horn Papers” were an elaborate genealogical hoax and one that might be the subject of another article somewhere down the road. Needless to say, this revelation did little to change my opinion of undocumented family history.

An-n-n-ywa-a-a-y… I made copies of all 216 pages in that binder, if you’re interested. Fair warning that they’re all in William Mitchell’s not-so-great handwriting and he could write smaller than anyone I’ve ever known. You’ve been warned.

Cheers!
Rick