A Clever Tool for Working with Dates

A cool tool for using Date Calculations for family history search.

Date Calculations Made Easy

Genealogists are all about working with dates and need a reliable tool to help make complex date calculations. There is no need to manually figure out dates when there are tools available that make figuring out dates easy.

While going about your work, you might want to know things like:

How many days were there between two dates? (Ex. how many calendar days did the Civil War or World War 2 last)
What day of the week was my ancestor born?
Exactly how old was someone, given their birth and death dates?

When you run into questions like these, there is a really helpful website timeanddate.com that can assist you in quickly and easily get the answers you need. Just go to the website and click on the “Calculators” tab.

The company that manages the website is located in Norway and the site has been operational since 1998. With the transient nature of the Internet, it is good to know that they are stable and will continue to be there next time you go back to use their tools.

For examples 1 and 3 above, click on the “Date to Date Calc” tab and put the two dates in. You will get an answer in the normal form of years, months and days and also in seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks in case you need that.

For example 2, click on the “Weekday” tab and put in the birth date.

Fun Facts:

The Civil War lasted from April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865 which comes out to 1458 days from the start date to the end date, but not including the end date or 3 years, 11 months, 28 days excluding the end date.

According to the website, this can also be converted to:

125,971,200 seconds
2,099,520 minutes
34,992 hours
1458 days
208 weeks and 2 days
399.45% of a common year (365 days)

World War 2 lasted from September 1, 1939 to September 2, 1945 which comes out to 2193 days from the start date to the end date, but not including the end date or 6 years, 1 day excluding the end date.

According to the website, this can also be converted to:

189,475,200 seconds
3,157,920 minutes
52,632 hours
2193 days
313 weeks and 2 days
600.82% of a common year (365 days)

There is no end to the fun you can have with this website once you start using this tool for your date calculations.

The website also has other functionality like calendaring, time, weather, sun and moon calculations, which might be worth a look.

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