Perpetual Calendar
CalculatorsChoose a month and enter a year to see that month's full calendar. Four digit year, so 87 AD is 0087.
Perpetual Calendar
Shows any month and year as a day-of-week calendar. Use it to verify what day of the week a birth, marriage, or death occurred — helpful when cross-referencing event records or confirming a date transcription.
What a weekday confirms
Why does the day of the week matter in genealogy research?
A record that gives both a date and a day — “Sunday the 14th” — contains a check on itself. The two agree or they do not, and either outcome is informative: agreement corroborates the reading, disagreement points at something worth re-examining.
What day of the week were christenings, marriages, and burials recorded on?
Weekdays carry expectations worth testing a reading against. Christenings were normally performed on Sundays, so a christening recorded on a Tuesday is worth a second look. The expectation runs the other way too: a civil marriage or a court record dated to a Sunday is unusual. These are tendencies rather than rules, and they vary by religion and country.
Narrowing an uncertain date
How do I find the year when a record gives a date and a day of the week?
When the day and month are known but not the year, the weekday is a strong filter. A Sunday will only fall on the 14th in certain years, so a partial year or a range of options often reduces to one.
How do I find the date when a record only gives the day of the week?
An obituary saying a person passed last Wednesday, or a notice giving the day of a funeral, names a day the record never dates. Where the month is known from elsewhere, only four or five dates in it fall on that day. That rules out most of the month without settling on one; combined with anything else to hand — a burial within a few days, a term or session date — it usually gets there.
Calendar in use
Why doesn’t the day of the week match for a date before 1752?
The calendar shown is the Gregorian calendar, extended back before 1582 as if it had always been in force. That is the correct calendar for any record made after the country of origin changed — see the adoption dates on the Julian ↔ Gregorian converter. For a record made before that date, the weekday the clerk wrote is the Julian weekday, and it will not match what this calendar shows. Converting the date to Gregorian first, then looking it up here, gives the right day.
What if the date and the day of the week in a record don’t match?
Before assuming the record is incorrect, a methodical review may explain the conflict. A transcription may have passed through an index, and either step can introduce an error - a 3 misread as a 5 moves the day of the week by two days. Comparing the original document and the transcription may resolve the conflict. Another explanation is the calendar itself: checking which calendar was in effect for that time and place is the next step — see the answer above.