When as a group we started to upload Pvt Gordon’s diaries to our website we made a important discovery. It turns out that both diary 3987 and diary 3983 claim to take place during the same exact time. Each diary claims to end on March 18th 1864. Now there are of course a number of reasons this is impossible. Other then the obvious question why would he keep two diaries? The two diaries have conflicting content and conflicting days of the week for the apparent same date.
To try and figure this out Alex figured out that diary 3983 started on Tuesday November 10th, by using a calendar application he was able to confirm that November fell on a Tuesday in 1863 so diary 3983 was in fact the diary for November 10th- March 18th. I started to do some looking into diary 3987 which claimed to go from July 10th 1863- March 18th 1864. What I found was that July 10th did not fall on a Wednesday as the diary claimed. In 1863 July 10th actually fell on a Friday, however in 1861 July 10th did fall on a Wednesday .
Originally we as a group was convinced that diary 3987 was the correct diary for 1863, this was because the diary actually had an old label on the back that said the diary went from July 10th 1863- March 18th 1864.
Another reason we were very convinced was that the first page of the diary also had 1863 written on it. We first figured that it was Gordon who included the year because the numbers looked very similar to his numbers. However under closer inspection the numbers for the year are slightly different then his.
When we realized that these two diaries were so mislabeled I realized we needed to check the other diaries just in case those also got wrong dates attributed to them. (I am currently in the process of checking those now.) I am still unsure why this label was ever attached to the diary when the year is clearly incorrect or why someone wrote into the diary. However this process has reminded me of the danger when you assume that sources you receive all have the correct data. Thankfully we caught this, however mislabeling and incorrectly categorized dates are a big issue in researching especially when you assume that all the information is correct.
