What day of the week was it?

We don’t think about this very much, but as I was looking at some dates related to my philatelic pursuits, it struck me that it was likely that a lot of records wouldn’t have been dated on a Sunday.  But how do we know what day of the week any particular date fell on in history?  UNIX systems include a utility called “date” in almost all distributions. 

To those of you who don’t have UNIX or Linux systems handy, which is the great majority of genealogists that I know, take a look at a site currently called The return of Calendar.  Using a cgi script, the site calls the date function on the web server with year numbers dating as far back as 1582.  The output is a full year’s calendar in the Gregorian calendar (the calendar that most of the Western world uses today).

Links from Geneabloggers Radio

I was able to check in at Geneabloggers Radio again tonight, making this my third week participating live.  Tonight’s topic was cemeteries.  This week’s reading list (in no particular order) from the chat is…