Simple Way to Get Date Information

As it turns out, there is no need to keep dates of events consigned to either a paper file or in a document stored for reference. While our own site provides a good reference for those grave markers that say "Joseph Goggins died January 28, 1816, aged 27 years, 2 months and 7 days" on Simply ask Google for simple date questions! This probably works with other search engines as well. Certainly duckduckgo provides the answers, though not quite in as big type at the top of the search. Ditto for Yahoo. Usually a simpler query gets better results than an involved question.

Example 1 includes official census day dates. One obtains the same results from "census day 1790." Apparently Google is smart enough to know that something like "census day 1891" is some sort of British thing, though it doesn't mention that the England and Wales Census was the day before the Canadian version.

Google tells when was census day in 1790

Example 2 provides what day of the week was associated with an arbitrary date. One obtains the same results from "jan 28 1816 day"

Google tells what day was January 28, 1816

A similar approach can be used for all sorts of things. For example, to find out when the dates for "died Tuesday and funeral on Saturday" falls when you know the date of a newspaper clipping, simply ask "calendar for December 1941." You'll see that December 7th fell on a Sunday. Alternately, you can see the day of example 2 by searching "calendar for January 1818." Also if there is something like "1749/50," Google can provide insight as to the proper way to treat it genealogically, as well as which number means what.