Saturday, February 7, 2015

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Relatives Born on My Birth Date

Randy's challenge tonight for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun was to find out if any of your ancestors or cousins had the same birth date as you do:

1)  What is your birth date (not the year, only month and day)?

2)  Review your records, or use your genealogy management program to create a list of persons in your database born on your birth date.  Are any of them your ancestors, or siblings of your ancestor?  Tell us how you figured it out too.

3)  List one or more of those born on your birth date in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or on Facebook or Google+. 

1.  My birthday is April 9 (which is also the date of the official ending of the American Civil War, when Robert E. Lee surrendered).

2.  I used my family tree program to look for this information.  I have information on additional relatives who are not yet entered in my program, so there may be another birth date match somewhere.  I was surprised to learn that I could not search by month in the birth date field.  What I ended up doing was creating an index of all the individuals in my database (7,626 people) and sorting it by birth year, then scanning each year for April 9.  Kludgy, I know, but it was the quickest way to do it.

I found six people with April 9 as their birthday.  None of them is an ancestor or a sibling of an ancestor.  The closest relative is a second cousin, the most remote a fourth cousin twice removed.  One person is not related to me at all; like Randy, I have information about extended family members in my tree.  I determined the relationships by using the relationship calculator function in the family tree program.  The earliest birth year is 1907, the most recent 1996.

I already knew that my third cousin Yoni and I have the same birthday.  We call each other "birthday cousins", which I mentioned in a post about him winning a sportswriter award in 2013.

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