February 30? - Always Find the Source of the Source!

With this being a leap year I thought I'd share one of the more interesting calendar related errors I've come across in my travels. It is for the burial of Michael Stafford, who according to the transcription of the record was buried on 30 Feb 1900.

Screen capture taken 28 Jan 2024 from Ancestry for the "Ontario, Canada, Roman Catholic Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1760-1923" register page with the entry for Michael Stafford buried 30 Feb 1900 in St. Augustine, Ontario, Canada.

As we all know, we can't trust transcriptions so our first thought is that the transcriber of the register made a mistake and no one caught it.

St. Augustine (St. Augustine, Ontario, Canada), Ontario, Canada, Roman Catholic Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1760-1923, "Baptism, Marriage, Burial, Confirmation; Goderich, St Augustine; 1861-1910," Michael Stafford, buried 30 Feb 1900, Interment p 2; digital images, Ancestry.com, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 28 Jan 2024).

I thought that too. But when I looked at the column formatted register page, on the second to last line in the register the date is clearly written "1900 Feb 30".

Yet this is a column formatted register and it isn't in the usual format we often see in Roman Catholic church registers.Might there be an entry in the parish register itself?

Fortunately for us, that set of books have been digitized and also made available to us on both Ancestry and FamilySearch.

St. Augustine (St. Augustine, Ontario, Canada), "Baptisms 1895-1917, Deaths 1895-199, Marriages 1895-1911, Confirmations 1895-1927," p 14, burial of Michael Stafford, 3 Feb 1900; DGS 5,107,225, item 3, image 148 of 684.

We can clearly read (at least those who have learned to read cursive) that:

"On the third of February nineteen hundred, I the undersigned parish priest buried in the Catholic cemetery of St. Augustine, the body of Michael Stafford aged sixty seven years."

At least the original entry in the church books makes sense. I just wonder what the poor clerk was thinking when they created the entry in that column formatted register. Their brain might just have been tired from copying the information.

Since his death was in the time when civil registrations of deaths in Ontario should have been filed with the authorities we can check the date of his death.

Ancestry.com, "Ontario, Canada, Deaths, 1869-1938 and Deaths Overseas, 1939-1949," database on-line, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 21 Jan 2019), entry for Michael Stafford, died 1 Feb 1900; citing Archives of Ontario; Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Collection: MS935; Reel: 97.

And we can see that on line 4 of the death register that it is recorded that he passed away on "Feby 1 1900" with the date of registration on "Feby 2 1900".

So remember, when things just don't seem to add up, start digging deeper!

This is just another lesson of why we always need to try to follow the records back to the original source document. Sometimes, such as in this case, we can make use of the digitized image. Other times we may need to consult a microfilm or original paper document.