29 December 2010

Age and Birth Date on Ancestry.com's Canadian Crossings


Don't get me wrong, I like Ancestry.com and use it daily, but this really has me confused.
A match on the Canadian border crossings shows an Elmer E. Drollette arriving on 8 November 1916 at age of 22 years, 8 months. Fine. How does this turn into a date of birth of 31 Oct 1866.
The image shown here was a screen shot, with no changes made. I'm going to be much more cautious now about the inferred dates of birth from these records. The actual record does not provide a date of birth, at least not one that I could see.
Elmore is a first cousin of my wife's great-grandmother and I'm working on him for an upcoming Casefile Clues column.