4Family-History Birthdays
- 4Family-History Birthdays
- Remembering April Birthdays
Stories about our ancestors will also include monthly birthday remembrances. Although birthday celebrations differ between cultures and time periods, their importance to humanity is unquestioned. Just ask any eight-year-old. Or an Egyptian Pharoah, whose birthday was noted for the day of his or her ascendancy as ruler and god.
With birthdays come celebrations; gatherings with gifts and cake are popular. My husband’s mother always baked a decorated cake. On his 21st birthday she baked a cake with the top divided into squares. Each square featured the decoration of each of his past birthday cakes. Yes, I was there, and I have known him for that long!
Consistent, if not accurate dates, are important for driver’s licenses and passports. When my Mom applied for her first passport, her birth date came into question and then there was a domino effect through all of her records. It was a near catastrophe. Birth dates, in our modern world, are important.
In the world of genealogy and family history, just as with government records, this bit of data helps to distinguish between two people with the same name. It also links individuals to their parents and families. And it grounds each person in a specific time period. All of these reasons make family historians keen about learning the correct date of birth.
In this series, known birth dates from the great-grandparents of my children to their fifth great-grandparents will be remembered with a post each month. I wish I could say I had all of the birth dates of all of those ancestors. That would be 258 individual birth dates. Hopefully, this series will bring to light those for whom I do not have a birth date, yet.