If a tombstone gives a date of death and an age of death, the date of birth can be calculated for entry into a database. It should clearly be indicated when entering in and sourcing the date of birth that a calculated date of birth was used.
That way it has been made clear that the stone did not give the actual date of birth.
Of course if the birth date is on the stone it should be entered in your database–citing the stone, but not indicating that the date was calculated.
4 Responses
You are right, of course! I just want to point out that I have found at least 2 instances in my tree where the date etched in stone was wrong! The person giving the year of birth was misinformed.
I have one stone where I think they changed the year of the wife’s birth to make her look closer to her husband’s age than she actually was.
The birthdate on the tombstone of one of my great uncles is wrong by several years. I always assumed that he had told his wife that he was older than he was, but she died several years before he did. They had no children, so it is likely that he bought the stone & had the incorrect date entered. In this case I have noted that the birthdate on the Missouri birth record & on his Workd War I draft record is more correct than the tombstone.
I’ve seen date errors on family stones and in fact I am guilty of making errors, based on information I was given. My gr grandmother was buried with her mother and there was no marker on their grave. When I reached adulthood and had the means, I purchased a stone for their grave. I based their birth year’s on information that was then available to me on records in the cemetery files. Many years later when I began doing genealogy research, I found that both birth years were off by a year, one a year too early, one a year too late. I am also certain that my ancestors, a group of 6 brothers, falsified their ages when they migrated from east to west, some of them by as much as 5 to ten years! I don’t believe they have markers on their graves, however the dates in the cemetery records reflect the incorrect ages. I would not trust the dates on a gravestone as being 100% accurate. There are many reasons they can be wrong, especially on the birth year/date.