Useful Calendar Tools

I spend a lot of time looking a parish records in Norway from 1700-1900 AD. Many of the older records name the liturgical name for that particular Sunday instead of the calendar date. This requires some interpretation and the following is a description of what I have used in the past. I previously posted this to the Trondelag listserv at rootsweb.com and on Dick Eastman's member pages.

If you are struggling with date conversions as I have many times, try these bookmarks.

I keep these bookmarks handy when I am looking at the digitized parish records. They are very handy for figuring out dates. Sometimes I have to go back or forwards a few records to find a recognizable liturgical date, but then I can usually figure out which date I need. For example, I might find a baptism a few records back that occurred on Palm Sunday, and then be able to figure that the Sundays after refer to Easter, Misericordia Domini (1st Sunday after), Jubilate (2nd Sunday after), Cantate (3rd Sunday after), etc. It seems a good portion of the year is counted by the numbers of Sunday after Trinity so often you can count from there.

This bookmark lists the liturgical/ecclesiastical dates and their meanings:
http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~norway/ecclesiastical.html

This bookmark lists when the liturgical/ecclesiastical dates occur in any given year (Click on the Back to Ecclesiastical Calendar to get to the year entry form):
http://www.smart.net/~mmontes/ec-cal.html

And finally, this bookmark gives a one page calendar for any given year. It's very handy for counting those dates like 15th Sunday after Trinity. You simply choose a year and click Make Calendar (in the current webpage layout, it is the very top choice on the page). You get a printable one-page calendar in a new window.   http://www.calendarhome.com/tyc/ 

The link above is great for figuring out dates in other cases also, for example, when looking at news articles where you know the publish date and the article refers to next Tuesday as the day for a funeral service, it is easy to figure out what the actual date is the article is referring to.


Since I posted these links a few years ago, I have found an app, called RC Calendar which claims to be a liturgical calendar from 1970 to 2300 and beyond. I found that it seems to be equally good before 1970 even by a few hundred years. I haven't done a huge sampling to check the dates but I am satisfied so far with its calculations. This app works on iPhones and iPads and it looks like it is made for other mobile devices also.

I wish you good luck figuring out those dates!