The dates displayed in the Grave Search follow the extended ISO 8601 format.  Year-Month-Day (YYYY-MM-DD)  makes it easy to sort by date if the date is treated like a string of characters.  When we have just Year and Month, but no Day, the Day is represented by "00".  If we have Year only, the Month and Day are represented by zeroes.  Unknown dates can be either blank or "0000-00-00".  The side effect of this standard is that unknown Month and Day will be sorted before January 1 of that year.

The first source for the Grave Search database was an Excel spreadsheet.  Excel begins its dates in 1900.  Full dates before 1900 were represented by text strings.  Unknown month and days were sometimes represented by the first day of the month or of the year.  Sometimes years were represented as a number.

We admit there were mistakes made in transcription and importing the records, which we are trying to correct by researching obituaries, tombstones and other records.  If you see any errors, please write us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .