Historical Events that Happened on Birthdays & Anniversaries
As you go about gathering information on birth-marriage-death dates for your ancestors, keep a running list of some of those dates. Interesting aspects to add to the family stories, once you start putting them together, are any intriguing and beguiling historical events or occurrences that happened the same day-same year. Even if you can’t locate any event the same time period including the year, you generally can find a historical event worth making note of for that same month and day.
It is somewhat a time line, but more focused on a specific date. Think of it as ‘this time in history’. True, your ancestor who was born, married or died on that date may not have been aware of that incident, but the descendants will find it interesting to match up a family date and a historical moment.
How do you find it, just start with a date. Use a perpetual calendar to have also the exact day of the week; Tuesday, Friday, etc. Using ‘Calendar of Historical Events’ Internet site locate the date such as August 27th. Click on it and up will be a full listing of historical events. If you want to see right away if there was an event for a specific date including year there is a place on the right side to put in that information.
Once you have a month and day the full listing of world events follows in chronological order. Some of the fascinating events for August 27th include: 1610-Polish King Wladyslaw crowned king of Russia; 1665-the first play performed in North America titled “Ye Bare & Ye Cubb” occurs in Acomac, Virginia; 1783-the first hydrogen unmanned balloon flight takes place; 1859-major oil well drilled, near Titusville, Pennsylvania; 1883-massive volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, west of Java in southeast Asia, killing approximately 37,000 people and spreading ash around the globe for two years; 1896-the shortest war lasting 38 minutes when England defeated Zanibar in Africa; 1927-Parks College opens as an early aviation school; 1955-Guinness World Book of Records was first published; 1958-the Russian Sputnik 3 was launched into space with 2 dogs; 1975-night tennis matches begin for the US Open; and 1984-U. S. teacher in space program announced.
These are just some from the long selection of 152 events for August 27th. Additional items to look for on this same site are famous births and deaths on this date. Go to the top and tabs listing birthdays and deaths on this day can be clicked on. There were 250 listings of famous or notable people born on August 27th, including President Lyndon B. Johnson. For deaths on August 27th there were 125 names.
So there is quite a bit of information available to mix with your family history, it does not have to be just dates, but what was happening really adds to the story. Anything you can locate in hometown newspapers of local events really adds the personal touch.
NOTE: On Saturday, August 27, 1983 was when my husband and I were married. We always note it as one hundred years later from when Krakatoa exploded.
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