Repeating dates

The amateur genealogist, in the great adventure of building his tree, quickly finds himself faced with an accumulation of information associated with the members of his ancestry: names, first names, places, dates... lots of dates. Generally three for each ascendant, procreation outside of marriage being the exception except in current times.

Not to mention multiple marriages, possible divorces, etc.
And we can rejoice in the age of the archives available in our country, as well as the precision of the dating.

And if he pays attention, there's a good chance he'll spot some curious date correspondences, i.e. events concerning related people that occur on "anniversary dates" (the same day of the year).

What could be less astonishing, given that there are only 366 different dates: a complete 7-generation ancestry, made up of 127 members, will provide three times as many dates, i.e. 381: there are bound to be duplicates.

In fact, a simple calculation of probabilities tells us that you only need to consider a group of eight ancestors to obtain more than one chance in two of having at least one pair of anniversary dates!

Professional genealogists are no strangers to this problem, as they spend most of their time collecting dates. So, logically, he could confine this phenomenon to the simple combined effect of statistics and coincidence.

Except... as Brassens would have said, "il y a des hasards bien singuliers".
Who wouldn't be intrigued to discover, over several successive generations, multiple repetitions of dates and events experienced at identical ages?

If being confronted with "reminders" of ages or dates can happen in everyday life, having a family tree with the dates of major events in the lives of a multitude of members of the same family can be a pretext for specific research on this theme.

This can be done "by hand", but it requires rigor and, above all, a great deal of patience... And don't forget to sort out the information that emerges according to its relevance.

Please note that this is not psychogenealogy, an approach that seeks to remedy symptoms by linking them to events experienced by more or less close ancestors.
The analysis we propose is not intended to be therapeutic, but rather to highlight possible repetitions in the dates that make up your genealogy.

The research is carried out on all the members of the tree and not on a particular individual. It is then up to you, who knows your family much better than the genealogist, to draw lessons from these correspondences based on the family context.

Dessine-moi un arbre offers you a personalized service, based on an existing genealogy that you send us in Gedcom format, for example. A detailed analysis will be returned to you, based on all the dates supplied (subject to their validity).

This analysis includes :

. an exhaustive list of repeated dates concerning only people linked by direct descent

• an exhaustive list of age matches across a wide range of events, for each individual in your genealogy in relation to their relatives (age at marriage, age at death, age at death of a parent, age at birth and on the death of a child, age of death of a child, etc.)