I fact, I am told that often people were unsure of when their birthday actually was.
To confirm birth-dates, for any official government documentation, you had to go back and check out the Baptism Registers, which would have recorded both the actual date of birth, and the date of baptism.
Even marriage records would often be wrong...as the married party gave their estimation on how old they were...sometimes they listed they were 19 when they got married, when they were actually 20...and so on.
But, if there was no need to check, then, well, you often didn't know actually how old a person really was.
A case to show this would be one of my great-grandmothers'. Marie Eva Heit was born sometime around 1872 or 1873.
She would marry my great-grandfather, Johannes Dieser, on November 8, 1894 (OS). They would have 9 children, one of whom was my grandmother, Elisabeth.
When we reconnected with family in the USSR, family members there thought Marie Eva was born in October of 1873.
This past week we learned the truth.
Everyone was wrong. Marie Eva's baptism/birth record show she was actually born on March 9, 1872 (OS) and baptized the next day.
As I suspected, the record for her marriage to my great-grandfather states she was 21, when she was actually 22...and my great-grandfather 21, when he was actually 20.
In the great scheme of things, it doesn't really matter to most people. It means she was 61 when she starved to death under Stalin's forced famine of the 1930's.
But once again it shows me how incredibly insightful my grandmother was when she told me her stories about "the old country".
I will have more to say about this amazing woman, my great-grandmother. It was she who penned some of our "Last Letters", shortly before she succumbed to starvation.
(I am thankful to Alois Schaab for finding my great-grandmother's baptism/birth record after all these years)
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