Talk:Edward Smith-Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby

date of birth 12. septembre or 12. december??
There are differences between the german and the english version.. -- 80.145.184.164 (talk) 23:52, 10 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I've been having a look at this issue.
 * We say he was born 12 December, but both of the major reference sources we use (The Peerage and Alumni Cantabrigienses) say he was born on 12 September. So there's a conflict there already.
 * This very detailed page from Cracroft's Peerage also says 12 September.
 * This says he was born on 12 September 1752 and was registered at Preston on 3 October. That kind of puts paid to any birth in December.


 * However, it gets worse. From Gregorian calendar:
 * Britain … adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, by which time it was necessary to correct by 11 days. Wednesday, 2 September 1752 [OS] was followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752 [NS].
 * That is, there were no such dates in Britain as 3 - 13 September 1752. But Lord Derby's supposed date of birth "12 September 1752" fell within this group of non-existent dates.


 * How can we interpret this?
 * One possibility is that he was actually born on 23 September 1752 [NS], and someone has calculated that that would have been 12 September in the OS calendar, and the 12th is the date that got reported and has come down through the public records. Only trouble is, the OS calendar ceased to have any relevance in Britain 10 days before this birth occurred (if that's in fact when it actually occurred), and hence such a calculation is meaningless and useless.


 * More likely is that the adoption of the new style calendar took a little while to bed down, particularly amongst those who saw it as papist evil, and old style dates continued to be used for some some time in some records.


 * I'd happily agree that an error was made and he really was born on 12 December - were it not for the above cite that shows him being "registered" on 3 October, which presumably means he was alive on that day. Further, if he was born in December, why do all the major reliable sources report a September birth?


 * Basically, we can rule out BOTH 12 September 1752 and 12 December 1752. So, when was he actually born?  My gut says 23 September 1752, but we need more than my gut instinct to go on.


 * Why has nobody noticed this problem before now? I base that question on my exhaustive trawling through online resources, but it may have been canvassed in biographies I've not seen.


 * We really do need to get this sorted out. Can anyone help?  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  05:18, 30 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Both the ODNB and History of Parliament Online give the 12th of September 1752. DuncanHill (talk) 22:37, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I suspect the 12th of December was a simple typo on the part of the editor (now retired) who first introduced a birthdate to the article. I appreciate this doesn't resolve the problem with the Stolen Days, but we should go with what reliable sources say, on which note I would say that thepeerage.com is not really a reliable source in the Wikipedia sense. ODNB and HistofParl are. DuncanHill (talk) 22:48, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, but any source, no matter how reliable they may be considered, cannot be trusted if they specify a date that simply did not exist. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  23:31, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, we don't have any sources for 12th December. DuncanHill (talk) 23:34, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
 * December is manifestly not a goer, as I pointed out in 2012 (above). --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  00:04, 2 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Is there any dispute over the 3 October date? We might just say "birth registered 3 October" or something of the sort, if it be established clearly.  If I remember rightly, historians routinely use the date of baptism (or other incidents shortly following birth) in place of a birth date if the incident in question can easily be established and the birth date cannot.  Nyttend (talk) 23:49, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Not sure I have seen any birth registration in England before 1837! MilborneOne (talk) 18:21, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
 * See General Register Office for England and Wales. There was no central registration until an act of 1836, but births were recorded by local parish churches.  That issue aside, is anyone suggesting that he wasn't born in September 1752?  Couldn't we just give that and add a note saying "lots of sources say 12 September, but that wasn't possible"?  Nyttend (talk) 23:36, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I've already done exactly that. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  23:45, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Copied from Reference desk/Humanities
Birthdate of Edward Smith-Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby

A serious issue with Edward Smith-Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby's supposed date of birth has remained unresolved since 2012. Please see Talk:Edward Smith-Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby for details.

The basic problem is that we say he was born in December 1752, yet reliable sources have his birth being registered 2 months earlier, in October. The supposed September birthdate that led to this October registration is also a problem because it did not exist in Britain due to the elimination of 11 days from the calendar when switching from the Julian to Gregorian calendars.

Can anyone resolve this once and for all? Thanks. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:21, 1 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Not only were 11 days removed but the beginning of the year was also shifted, from 25 March to 1 January. Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 says that in England and Wales, the legal year 1751 was a short year of 282 days, running from 25 March to 31 December (i.e. it was stopped at 31 December instead of carrying on). 1752 began (the next day) on 1 January.


 * Now in 1751, with the year beginning in March, December would have been the 10th month. This makes sense, since Sept-ember=7th month, Oct-ober=8th, Nov-ember=9th, and Dec-ember=10th. Assuming the birth occurred in December 1752, the discrepancy could have arisen because someone had a lapse of concentration and mistakenly entered 10 for the month December. This is most likely to have happened soon after the birth, less than a year after the shift to January 1st New Years Day. It seems very likely that December is the correct month of birth. Akld guy (talk) 06:39, 2 July 2018 (UTC)


 * But then why do reliable sources say he was born in September, and that his birth was registered in October? To make one mistake would be a misfortune; to make two looks like ... well, you know the rest.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  08:12, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, I used December for my example because you stated above that the article says December 1752. But the same two month offset applies to September and October too (and November for that matter). Akld guy (talk) 09:11, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I note that the article currently shows no sources for DOB or registration. Akld guy (talk) 09:18, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
 * There are no sources that say December, there are sources, such as the ODNB and History of Parliament Online, which say 12th September, as noted on the article talk page. DuncanHill (talk) 10:39, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, he may have been born in November 1752, and as I said, the pre-1752 numeral of 9 for November was mistakenly entered instead of 11. From 1752 onwards, the 9th month is September, so his DOB has been mistakenly shifted forward two months because the wrong numeral was used. Both errors (DOB and registration) may have occurred at the same time. I doubt we'll ever know. Akld guy (talk) 23:07, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
 * C'mon, everyone knows he was born on the Twelfth of Never. Clarityfiend (talk) 22:58, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Akld guy, the talk page has a link to the text of this book as a citation for the registration date. It makes the nonexistent-birth-date error, but overall it's a reliable source; the gentry and nobility would be expected to guard their history accurately (think of Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch, brooding over his appearance in a genealogical book), so barring something that can be proven wrong, like the birth date, I expect that it can be trusted.  Nyttend (talk) 11:52, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Similarly, if you look him up in Burke's Peerage, it gives 12 Sept 1752. However, Burke gave 18 Sept 1752 in its first edition in 1826 . You could look him up in all the editions over the years (links in our Burke's Peerage article) to track when and how it changed, but I don't know how you would determine Burke's own source. 70.67.222.124 (talk) 16:51, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Presumably you wouldn't. See Burke's_Peerage; apparently he's full of mistakes.  Nyttend (talk) 23:33, 3 July 2018 (UTC)


 * The House of Stanley from the 12th Century (Peter E. Stanley, 1988) (which I can partially see on Google Books) has September 1 on p. 277 and September 12 on p. 278, so that's no use (seems to be written by an amateur genealogist anyway). Derby: The Life and Times of the 12th Earl of Derby (Millard Cox, 1974) is not online, but maybe it has something useful if someone can track it down in a library. Some other results on Google suggest September 18. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:04, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Hold on, that may be of some use. If he were really born on 1 September 1752 [OS], that would be equivalent to 12 September 1752 [NS], because of the 11-day gap, which wasn't corrected in Britain until the day after he was born (2 September).  So, even though 12 September 1752 was a non-existent date in Britain, it was still a valid date in the Gregorian calendar, which Britain didn't start using till 14 September.  In other words, if Britain had converted years before 1752, and he had been born on what countries still using the Julian calendar called 1 September (e.g. Russia), he would have been recorded in Britain as having been born on 12 September (Gregorian).  I suspect this is the closest we have come to the truth.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:30, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
 * And particularly given the confusion and uncertainty that obtained during that transitional period, it's very easy to see how a just barely pre-Gregorian date, which should not have been converted to Gregorian, was in fact so converted. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  23:52, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I've solved this sort of problem on a different article by finding online images of the original, handwritten birth register for the year before the birth, the year of the birth, and the year after the birth. By observing when year and month numbers changed, it was possible to decipher the meaning of the entry for the subject of the Wikipedia article. (The one I worked on was for Pennsylvania; I have no special skill finding English parish registers, or wherever the birth was recorded.) Jc3s5h (talk) 00:01, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I have just stumbled across this thread. I think that the solution proposed above by JackofOz is almost certainly correct: that he was born on 1 September OS, which was retrospectively converted to 12 September NS. He may even have made the conversion himself: birthdays tended not to be celebrated in the modern sense in the 18th/19th centuries, but they were marked, and I've come across similar cases in which a person born pre-1752 would mark their birthday each year on a date retrospectively converted to NS. However, we still clearly need a reliable source to say that. My more immediate concern is the statement in n1 that "his birth was registered on 3 October". As already noted, there was no registration of births in England and Wales until 1837. Births may have been recorded in a semi-formal way, sometimes (vary rarely) within baptism registers, but they weren't "registered". Our only source for this statement appears to be Draper, The House of Stanley (1864), which actually says he "was born at Patten House, Preston, on the 12th of September, 1752, and was registered at Preston on the 3rd of October". This can only mean that his baptism was registered – i.e. he was baptised on 3 October (which would be plausible if he had been born three or four weeks earlier). I am therefore going to be bold and change the note to read "his baptism was registered on 3 October". GrindtXX (talk) 10:36, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Yesterday's edit brought the article into line with the consensus hammered out here.  Specifically, a member of Smith-Stanley's family (who has access to the relevant documents) states that he was born on 1 September.   The article uses


 * Lord Howard de Walden's Complete Peerage
 * Cracroft's Peerage
 * University of Cambridge
 * History of Parliament
 * House of Stanley (Peter Draper)
 * Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
 * Burke's Peerage

All the dates in these works are New Style - it is academic practice to convert them and Wikipedia follows the practice. For example:


 * Georgia Day article says James Oglethorpe landed in Georgia on 12 February 1733.  No he didn't, as explained here .   If you are now going to outlaw conversion to New Style because it is "original research" and "synthesis" hundreds of articles are going to have to be changed and Wikipedia is going to be in conflict with its sources. 79.78.136.198 (talk) 14:56, 5 July 2018 (UTC)


 * What we don't have is any reliable source saying he was born on 1st September OS. All we have is a deduction based on various assumptions and conjectures. this is WP:SYNTH and we can't use that in the article. We may never have a reliable source for his birthdate. That happens sometimes. DuncanHill (talk) 15:05, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

If you're not then we can never provide a birthdate for anyone born between 1582 and 1923 where the "OS" "NS" label is omitted because we have lost our right to use our intelligence to determine which calendar (the old or the new) is being used. 79.78.136.198 (talk) 15:13, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
 * The sources DO NOT say he was born on 12th September NS. They don't say OS or NS, they just give a date which didn't exist in England in either style. DuncanHill (talk) 15:20, 5 July 2018 (UTC)


 * The IP mentioned my name in one of his edits to the main page (now reverted) to argue that a consensus had been reached; so let me put on record that I do not consider consensus to have been reached. I think it quite likely that Edward was born on 1 Sept OS/12 Sept NS, but, as I say above, "we still clearly need a reliable source to say that".
 * The IP also says above (now deleted) that it is "academic practice to convert" dates to New Style. This is simply not true. There is no absolute standard practice. The most common practice, if the author is dealing with a period pre-1752, is to adjust the start of the year from 25 March to 1 January, but otherwise to retain the OS dating of the primary sources. There are, of course, exceptions – e.g. where the subject matter spans the 1752 change, or involves international communications – and it is good (and widespread) practice to make a pragmatic decision according to circumstances, and then to explain what has been done in a preface or footnote.
 * Having got that out of the way, here is some new evidence. The baptism registers of St John Preston are available online here, and confirm that Edward was baptised on 3 October 1752. It also turns out that St John's was one of the rare parishes where the child's date of birth was noted, and Edward's is given as "1" (but regrettably no month). This could be interpreted as 1 October, but 1 September seems much more likely (and if you look at other entries you will see similar inconsistencies). Given the ambiguity, this is still not conclusive, and we still need a reliable secondary source that discusses the issue, but it seems to me that the evidence is building in favour of 1 Sept OS/12 Sept NS. GrindtXX (talk) 18:48, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Nice work finding the transcription of the parish register. My first observation is that they have quite a few baptisms; seldom are there more than a few days between baptisms, and there are often several on the same day. Next, I notice a gap from 2 Sep 1752 to 15 Sep 1752, which suggests they correctly observed the calendar change. I don't see anything to definitively resolve the ambiguity between 1 September or 1 October. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:07, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Also, note that babies were sometimes a few weeks old at baptism; "John Atkin - Son of John Atkin & Mary" was born on the 27th and baptised on 26 July, so the little guy was almost a month old even if the 27th were in June. At the same time, we have newborns being baptised, e.g. "Jennet Hodgkinson - Dr. of James Hodgkinson & Ellen" is born on 1 December and baptised on 2 December.  No consistency leaves open the possibility of either month; it's even more evidence for the impossibility of a conclusive answer.  Nyttend (talk) 00:49, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I'll agree with Nyttend's comment, and add that Catholics believed that if a baby didn't get baptized, it went to hell. (I'm not so sure what the Church of England believed). When I went to a Catholic school, every student was taught how to baptize, just in case a child was born close to death, and a priest could't get there in time. If the Church of England beliefs were anything like that in 1752, it would make sense that if a baby seemed sick, it would be baptized very promptly indeed. Jc3s5h (talk) 00:59, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Not sure what school you went to, but there is no official Catholic teaching about the fate of babies who die without having been baptised. A widely-held theory is that they go to limbo.  I've never heard any theory about them going to hell. But yes, Catholic parents are generally keen to baptise infants quickly, particularly if there's any risk of them not surviving long. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  10:05, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

I have located an online image of the original parish register, cited it, and placed a closeup of the entry for Edward Smith-Stanley on Commons. While the transcription already discussed only shows "1" for the birth date, the image states "Born 1st of September". I believe that now the best evidence is he was born 1 September 1752 Julian. We make mention (without citing them, which is an issue) of sources stating he was born 12 September. Those sources would be correct if they were projecting (knowingly or unknowingly) the Gregorian calendar to a date before its adoption in England. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:24, 7 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Many thanks for finally resolving this longstanding issue. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  18:56, 7 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Congratulations on finding the image. I have had a go at rewriting the explanation and adding references to sources etc. No doubt some of you will want to tweak what I have done, but I hope this is at least a reasonable basis for discussion. GrindtXX (talk) 19:39, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Reference "Thomson 2004"
There is a reference to "Thomson 2004" used in the article, but it is not defined. It was added by an IP editor in January 2017. THe IP has not edited since. Can anyone identify the source? Yet another duff short citation, they really are far more trouble than they are worth. DuncanHill (talk) 23:43, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I've rescued it, found it in the article on his first wife. DuncanHill (talk) 00:38, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

A few notes on sources
1) thepeerage.com is not a reliable source so can everybody please stop using it?

2) Please read this about the caution that must be exercised when using Primary sources, such as baptismal records.

3) Stop fucking edit warring. DuncanHill (talk) 11:26, 6 July 2018 (UTC)


 * The only sources that count, as far as WP:V is concerned, are sources that are in the article. Sources mentioned in edit summaries, talk pages, or other articles don't count.
 * The editor who adds information and a citation should have read the source herself; a description of the source by another editor in the talk page is not sufficient. So if only one editor in a talk page discussion has access to a particular source, that editor will have to be the one to add the source to the article. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:05, 6 July 2018 (UTC)