Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Most Popular Date: November 20

Nancy over at My Ancestors and Me posted today about a popular date in her database, which just so happened to be today's date, October 9. She had 5 relatives who were either born, married, or died on this date. She asked her readers if they had a popular date as well. I had no idea, so I decided to do a little research.

First, I ran the Birthday and Anniversary List in RootsMagic. I saved it as a text file and then opened it in Excel. To separate the day/month from the year, I did some text-to-column work. Then I did a Pivot Table to see how many names showed up for each date. Of course, this did not have the death information included, so I created a custom report for the death dates of individuals in RootsMagic and then opened that in Excel as well. Creating the report was a little tricky because I had to figure out a way to tell the program to only include people with a full death date (i.e. not just a year). In the Search for Information box, I chose Death value is greater than or equal to 01 Jan. This seemed to do the trick.

My database has 4,149 people in it. The most popular date was....November 20! There were 19 birth, marriage, and death events that occurred on November 20. The second most popular date was March 5, with 14 birth and marriage events.

George HARGRAVE and Anastasie Aspasie TRAHAN were married 20 Nov 1829.
Edmond TRAHAN was born 20 Nov 1832.
Ursin Theomile PREJEAN and Adenysa LEGER were married 20 Nov 1854.
Wesley FINKLE died 20 Nov 1887.
Jules DOMINGUE and Adolphine BEGNAUD were married 20 Nov 1890.
Charles H. CHATTERSON was born 20 Nov 1891.
Lloyd Jay BASNEY was born 20 Nov 1892.
William J. CHATTERSON and Euphemia T. SPABEN were married 20 Nov 1900.
Felix TRAHAN was born 20 Nov 1901.
Jesse WARD and Rosanna Alphonsine PLONKEY were married 20 Nov 1909.
Leon A. CHATTERSON and Alma Albertine PLONKEY were married 20 Nov 1909.
Lillia TRAHAN was born 20 Nov 1912.
Eunice E. PEMBERTON was born 20 Nov 1919.
R.H.G. (living) was born 20 Nov 1945.
Cheryl Lee BERGERON was born 20 Nov 1947.
Chester Franklin FINK and Patricia U. KELLEY were married 20 Nov 1965.
G.A.P. and B.J.A. (living) were married 20 Nov 1971.
G.E.H. (living) was born 20 Nov 1978.
A.J.P. (living) was born 20 Nov 2007.

I will post more on each of these people, at least the non-living ones, at a later date. It will probably be several posts over a period of time. Thanks again, Nancy, for the idea!

1 comment:

  1. I think that's pretty amazing, not only to have so many events on the same date but also that RM will do the work for you. I'm still learning my way around RM and haven't graduated to the level of ability that you have, but it's something I'll have to try now that I know it's possible. Thanks for sharing the process. With so few names in my database it was fairly easy to remember and notice each new event for that date (probably because I could reference it to my sister's birth date).

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