52 Ancestors 2015 - Week 4 - Closest to your birthday

The challenge this week is to discover the ancestor whose day and month of their birthday is the closest to your birthday.

One of my family history research goals for the year is to investigate more thoroughly how to use  the features of Family Tree Maker which I purchased a couple of years ago to synchronise with the Ancestry files, thus creating a desk top copy of our family trees. There are many features of Family Tree Maker which I need to explore. Last year I purchased the booklet, So you are totally new to Family Tree Maker by John Donaldson and published by Unlock the Past and also the Victorian Gum DVD showing how to use the program. So far I have just experimented with making reports. It is time to learn how to use the program efficiently.

Before starting this challenge I already knew that my cousin has a birthday the day before mine and that she is three years older than me. However I decided to check the index for the People section of the program to see if anyone else, with a recorded birth date in the database, had a birthday close to mine.

In the above image there are 1998 names in the People index. Next to the house icon, which takes you to the Home person on the list, there are three lines and a small arrow. This provides options: None, Birth Date, Marriage Date, Death Date and Life Span. Selecting one of these options will provide the full date as entered  for each person. Selecting Year Only will provide only the Year for the event.  I selected Birth Date and then scrolled down the list to locate the date closest to my birth date.

For most of the records I do not have full date of birth however I still found a number of birthdays that were close to my birthday. In the Mackillop tree the first name with a date close to my birthday is Eleonora Abbott born 25 July 1874. James I of Scotland was also born on 25 July in 1394. Walter Capper was born 29 July 1796. Then I found Thomas Sufcliffe born on 28 July 1847.

In the Moses family tree I located Mary Farley born on 26 July 1716, James Roberts 28 July 1798 and John Smith 26 July 1800.

Therefore my cousin, John Smith, Mary Farley, James Roberts and Thomas Sutcliffe all have / had a birthday either side of mine.