A closer look at historical figures with March birthdays

Most historical figures with March birthdays were not registered on the day they were born. Their dates were rebuilt from a reign, a feast or an age at death, and each method leaves a different kind of error. Michelangelo, Haydn, Houdini and the others below are real, and so is the paperwork behind each date.

What to take away

March birthdays worth checking

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born 6 March 1475 in Caprese, in Tuscany. His family kept records, and early biographers used them, which is why the day survives.

The year is the disputed part. Florentine dating began the year on 25 March, so a date written in the Florentine style can land in the next year on a modern calendar.

Antonio Vivaldi was born 4 March 1678 in Venice. His baptism is recorded at the parish of San Giovanni in Bragora, which fixes the day.

Joseph Haydn was born 31 March 1732 in Rohrau, then in Austria. The day is not in doubt. The year once was, because a parish register entry was read against a different start of year.

Frédéric Chopin was born 1 March 1810 at Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw. That is the date he and his family used. The parish register at Brochów gives 22 February 1810, and both readings still appear in print.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born 21 March 1685 in Eisenach, which is 31 March on the Gregorian calendar. The parish register there survives, and reference works often print the newer date.

Harry Houdini was born 24 March 1874 in Budapest, and this is the rare case here with a civil registration behind it. Houdini himself gave Appleton, Wisconsin, and 6 April 1874 for most of his career. A subject's own account is a source, not the record.

Vincent van Gogh was born 30 March 1853 in Zundert, in the Netherlands. Civil registration had reached the Netherlands by then, so the record is a municipal one and can be requested from the Dutch archives rather than inferred.

Nikolai Gogol was born 31 March 1809 by the Julian calendar then in use in the Russian Empire. On the Gregorian calendar that is 12 April, which is why two reference works can both be right and still disagree.

Andrew Jackson was born 15 March 1767 in the Waxhaws, on the border of North and South Carolina. Both states have claimed the site, and his date rests on family testimony rather than a register.

Albert Einstein was born 14 March 1879 in Ulm, Germany. The birth sits in the city's civil register, so the date is a record rather than a reconstruction.

Dating by reign

A regnal year counts from the day a reign began, not from 1 January. "The fourth year of the reign" therefore spans parts of two calendar years.

Converting it needs the exact accession date, which is sometimes disputed. A document dated by regnal year alone gives a window of up to a year, narrowed only if a month and day are also given.

One error is converting a regnal year to the calendar year in which it began, ignoring that it ran into the next. Another is applying a regnal year from one ruler to another's reign, easy where rulers share a name and a number.

That moves an event by decades while producing a plausible date.

Dating by feast

A medieval or early modern document often gives a date as a feast, or its eve or morrow, taken from the calendar of saints in local use. A fixed feast is a definite day in its own calendar, so the conversion is exact if the calendar is known.

Feasts varied by diocese and by religious order. Some moved when calendars were reformed, and a few are movable feasts tied to Easter, falling on a different date every year.

A date given as the Tuesday after a movable feast cannot be resolved until the year is known. That is circular when the year is what you were trying to find.

The backwards birth year

For many historical figures no birth record survives, and the birth year in every reference work was computed. A tomb, a chronicle or a legal inquiry gives the age at death, and someone subtracted.

"Aged forty" means at least forty and under forty-one in modern usage. In older usage it may mean in the fortieth year, and it may be a round number offered because nobody knew. Formulae such as "forty years and more" were standard in some legal records and mean exactly what they say: a lower bound.

So a birth year derived from an age at death is a range, typically two years wide, and a reference work that prints a single year has picked one end of it. Two references disagreeing by a year on such a figure are not in conflict. They are reporting the same range from different ends.

The famous-February page explains why year errors behave worse than day errors in modern records. The same holds here, except that the range was there from the start.

What a historical entry should carry

The January index grades every entry by what it rests on, and a computed year rests on an inference and should say so.

The March pillar explains why even the calendar those feasts sat in was an approximation. The April page shows that the gap between an event and its record did not close when registration became civil.

Common questions

Is a birth year computed from an age at death worth publishing?

As a range with its derivation, yes. As a single year with nothing attached, it is a guess presented as a record.

Why do two reliable references give different years for the same medieval figure?

Usually because they resolved a regnal year, a feast or an age differently, and both were reasonable. Look for the working, not the answer.

Does any of this affect living people?

No. It affects how a monthly page should treat its older entries, and it is a reason to hold them to a different standard of precision than modern ones. The actors' page for February shows the opposite case, where the precision exists and should be withheld.