Bungling Birthdays

 

Who would forget their birthday? That's a question I find myself asking when I run into an ancestor reporting a roving date of birth.

Sometimes it's just a matter of a misplaced year. I've seen young men in previous centuries, eager to march off to war, insisting that their year of birth was earlier than it really was. Likewise, I've seen some aging relatives who suddenly gained a year overnight, when eligibility for Social Security benefits became a question. But a wandering day of birth? That's what has me puzzled.

It just so happens that today—February 8—is a day when I remember my family always celebrated my father's birthday. Only it wasn't his birthday. We just never knew that.

Long after my father passed away, one day I was visiting my much older half-sister and comparing notes on our family history—especially that closely-held Polish heritage of my father's secretive parents. The conversation wandered onto birthdates of various relatives. My sister made a comment about February 10 being when she remembered celebrating Dad's birthday.

Wait a minute, I thought. Surely she was mistaken about that memory. But no, she was quite confident in her childhood recollection.

That's when I remembered a small detail a distant relative had discovered about our dad. He had been poking around his computer during those earlier days of online genealogy and had located Dad's birth record. While the year of his birth had surprised me—not to mention this being the first document bearing the true surname of his immigrant parents—the record revealed another detail: neither I nor my older sister were correct about the day he was born. It wasn't the eighth, nor the tenth. It was February 5.

There, in my own family history, was an example of that frustrating wandering date of birth. Thinking of that now, I guess I can cut those other ancestors some slack, as well, for their inability to cite the same number each time they were asked to report their date of birth.