The Gregorian Calendar Enters Use in Russia

Pope Gregory XIII

On my mother's side of the family, I am (as far as I know and have been able to verify through research) 100% Jewish.  All of my Jewish immigrant ancestors and most of my Jewish immigrant relatives within memory (and based on research) lived in the Russian Empire.  A small number of those relatives remained within the empire long enough also to live in the Soviet Union.

And that means that all of those ancestors and collateral relatives lived with the Julian calendar.  You know, the calendar that was corrected and improved upon by Pope Gregory XIII (lucky 13?), thereby giving the world the Gregorian calendar.

The Julian calendar dates back to the days of Julius Caesar, from whom it takes its name.  It had a 365-day year with a leap day added every fourth year.

The Julian calendar was a little longer than the actual solar year — .0078 days per year.  That doesn't sound like much, but over time — 1,628 years — this created a problem with when the seasons began and, more importantly, with determining when Easter began.  That then became a problem for the Catholic church, which is when Pope Gregory enters the picture.

Pope Gregory commissioned a new, more accurate calendar and declared on February 25, 1582 that the day after October 4, 1582 would be October 15, 1582, correcting for this mistake by dropping ten days.  But he did not rule the world, only the church, so at first only the Papal States and the church itself enacted the change.  Not long after, many Catholic countries switched over.  Protestant countries took longer, because they didn't want to be following the edict of the Catholic church, but eventually most of them made the change also (Great Britain and its colonies, including what would become the United States of America, corrected the calendar in 1752, dropping eleven days).

But many parts of the world didn't change until the 20th century, including the Russian Empire.  In fact, the Russian Empire never did make the change.  The Russian Revolution occurred, the Russian Empire was dissolved, and the brand-spanking new Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, which became part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), declared that the country would switch to the Gregorian calendar.  January 31, 1918 was followed by February 14, 1918, dropping thirteen days to bring the calendar into compliance (because those additional centuries of extra leap days added up!).  So today is the 107th anniversary of the Russian change to the Gregorian calendar.  I love the fact that, once you took into account the changes in dates, the October Revolution actually took place in November.

All of my ancestors who were still alive left the Russian Empire before the October Revolution.  Most of my other relatives did also.

But a few were not able to leave quite that early and did live in the Soviet Union for some amount of time.

My great-grandfather's older sister, Etta Gorodetsky, married Dovid Kardish in the Russian Empire, and they had at least eight children there.  One child died in Europe, but Dovid, Etta, and the other seven children immigrated to Canada in 1927.

Dovid is probably my cousin, based on information I have found and been told, although I have not determined exactly how. But that makes everyone else in his family my cousins.  He had eleven known siblings.  Dovid's father and four of the siblings died in Europe, but his mother and six of his siblings were living in the Soviet Union before they left for Canada.  And one of Dovid's sisters never left; she married in the Russian Empire in what is now Ukraine, was still there during the transition to the Soviet Union, and eventually went to Uzbekistan, dying there before it became independent.

So all of those who did not leave before the fall of the Russian Empire went through the calendar transition from Julian to Gregorian.

The records I find for my relatives before the switch to the Gregorian calendar have dates based on the Julian calendar.

So I need to note in some way in my family tree that those dates are Julian, to make sure I'm accurately recording events.

I would prefer to enter the dates per the Julian calendar, because that's how they were originally recorded, and that's the logic I use for entering locations.  What it was called when the event happened is what I enter, and then I make a note that the location is now called something else.

But my computer program isn't able to handle dates that way.  When I put in a Julian date, it wants to interpret it as a Gregorian date, like all the other dates in the database.

What I eventually decided was to record the dates per the Gregorian calendar and then to make a note for each one of what the original Julian date was.  That way, the computer doesn't get confused, I still have the information about the date as originally recorded, and everyone is happy.  And I want to keep my computer happy.