What Century Was My Grandmother Born In?

My grandmother was born in Kyiv on December 31, 1899, at 11:30 PM, half an hour before midnight.

At the time, Kyiv was part of the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire still used the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in the United States and much of the rest of the world. At that time, the two calendars differed by 12 days.

December 31, 1899 on the Julian calendar was January 12, 1900 on the Gregorian calendar.

So before we have gone any further, my grandmother has already managed to be born in 2 different years.

When my grandmother was 5 years old, she and her family left Kyiv and made their way to the United States.

At some point, her birthday had to become part of her American paperwork.

And that is where I don’t know what happened.

Did someone simply copy the date from her old records and write December 31, 1899?

Or did someone recognize that her birthday had been recorded according to the Julian calendar and convert it to the corresponding Gregorian date, January 12, 1900?

Those 2 procedures preserve 2 different things. One preserves the date that was written down. The other preserves the actual day on which she was born.

My grandmother died before I became old enough to realize that this was a question worth asking her. Perhaps she would have remembered something about the family’s records or about how her birthday was celebrated. I never had the opportunity to ask.

But then there is the time.

She was born at 11:30 PM.

That seems wonderfully precise until we ask another question:

11:30 PM according to what clock?

Today we are accustomed to standardized time zones. In Kyiv at the end of the 19th century, the situation was different. Historical time-zone reconstructions assign Kyiv a local mean time of approximately 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 4 seconds ahead of Greenwich. It was time associated with Kyiv’s longitude rather than one of the neat whole-hour time zones familiar to us today.

The surviving historical reconstruction is not certain enough for me to claim that I know exactly what clock convention was used to record my grandmother’s birth. Railway clocks, local clocks, and other timekeeping practices could complicate the picture.

So 11:30 PM gives us another question rather than another answer.

If we wanted to identify not merely the date written on her birth record but the exact astronomical instant of her birth, we would need to know what that 11:30 PM meant.

And because she was born only 30 minutes before midnight, that question matters. Translate the time according to a different convention, and midnight—the boundary between one civil date and the next—is sitting very close by.

The calendar problem and the clock problem are therefore versions of the same problem.

A date is not an astronomical instant.

A clock reading is not an astronomical instant.

They are ways human beings describe an instant.

But there is another complication.

There is an old argument about when a century begins. Under the traditional numbering of the calendar, there was no year 0. The 1st century therefore began in the year 1, and the 20th century began in 1901. People who insist on this are sometimes called calendar purists—or, less charitably, calendar pedants.

But calling them pedants can make it sound as though everyone else is simply wrong.

They aren’t.

There is another perfectly real way in which people experience centuries. The 1800s belong together. The 1900s belong together. And when all 4 digits change at once, people experience that as a boundary.

Prince captured that idea wonderfully when he sang, “party like it’s 1999.”

He wasn’t talking about an abstract calendrical calculation. He was talking about a real party.

December 31, 1999, was going to be New Year’s Eve. People were going to have enormous parties to welcome the year 2000 and what they understood to be the new millennium. And when that night actually came, that is exactly what people did.

The calendar purist can point out that, because there was no year 0, the 3rd millennium technically began on January 1, 2001.

And the person standing at a New Year’s Eve party on December 31, 1999, waiting for every digit on the calendar to roll over, can reasonably answer:

“You may be right about the arithmetic, but this is the party.”

Both observations tell us something about what we mean by a century.

My grandmother died before I knew enough to ask her about any of this.

I do not know whether the date on her American records preserved her Julian birthday or the corresponding Gregorian day.

I do not know precisely what timekeeping convention stood behind the 11:30 PM recorded for her birth.

And even after answering those questions, we could still argue about what we mean when we say “century.”

So, to this day, I do not know what century my grandmother was born in.