An 1892 Greek Birth Certificate With a Julian-Calendar Date

What We Received

A family submitted a single-page Greek civil registry act of birth (Ληξιαρχική Πράξη Γεννήσεως) recorded in the village of Vourliotes, on the island of Samos, on October 18, 1892, and asked for a [certified Greek birth certificate translation](/translate/greek-birth-certificate) for a U.S. immigration filing. The body of the act was written by hand in Katharevousa Greek — the formal register used by Greek civil-registry offices in the 19th century — in cursive script of the period.

The same page also carried a continuation block recording the baptism, and, on the lower right, a modern (March 7, 2024) rectangular 'CERTIFIED TRUE PHOTOCOPY' stamp from the Civil Registry Office of the Municipality of Eastern Samos, a round official wet seal of the Hellenic Republic naming the same office, and the printed name and title of Mayor Paraskevas E. Papageorgiou. The body of the original 1892 act records the date in long-form ordinal Katharevousa: 'on the eighteenth of the month of October of the one thousand eight hundred ninety-second year.' Several proper names — the registrar, the witnesses, the godfather's surname, the day of the baptism, and the day of the week — were not fully legible in the cursive of the period.

How We Handled It

We preserved the long-form ordinal phrasing of the date verbatim in English — 'on the eighteenth of the month of October of the one thousand eight hundred ninety-second year' — rather than normalising it to '18/10/1892.' A [Translator's Note](/guides/translators-note-when-required) recorded that the phrasing reflects the source as written and that the underlying calendar is Julian; no Gregorian conversion was performed.

Every uncertain cursive reading was marked. Names that could not be deciphered were rendered as bracketed '[Illegible]'; where a partial reading was possible, we used '[Illegible: possibly Diamantis]' so the form of the partial reading is visible without presenting a guess as a fact. The two readings the family confirmed against their own records — the place of registration ('Vourliotes') and the mother's first name ('Patra') — were rendered as confirmed, with a Translator's Note recording that they were verified by the family rather than read from the cursive alone.

The modern 2024 certifying chain on the lower right was translated in full: the rectangular 'CERTIFIED TRUE PHOTOCOPY' stamp with its 'Ref. No.: 157' and 'Samos, March 7, 2024' fields, the round wet seal naming 'HELLENIC REPUBLIC — MUNICIPALITY OF EASTERN SAMOS — CIVIL REGISTRY OFFICE,' and the printed name and title of Mayor Paraskevas E. Papageorgiou. The handwritten registry-book page number '10' in the top right corner was noted for completeness, since it is a continuation of the Vourliotes registry-book pagination rather than a field of the act itself.

Expert Note

"The date of registration appears in the original as 'the eighteenth of the month of October of the one thousand eight hundred ninety-second year' (October 18, 1892); this corresponds to the Julian calendar in use in Greece at the time, and no conversion to the Gregorian calendar has been performed. Several proper names — the registrar, the witnesses, the godfather's surname, and the day of the baptism — could not be read with certainty from the mid-19th-century handwritten cursive and have been marked '[Illegible]' or, where partial reading was possible, '[Illegible: possibly ...]'. The place of registration ('Vourliotes,' a village on the island of Samos with a Saint John the Theologian parish) and the mother's first name ('Patra') were confirmed by the family of the document holder. The lower right portion of the page contains a modern (March 7, 2024) rectangular certification stamp from the Civil Registry Office of the Municipality of Eastern Samos certifying the document as a true photocopy, together with a round official wet seal of the same municipality and the printed name and title of the Mayor; the contents of these stamps and seals have been transcribed and translated within the body of the translation."

Sarah JenkinsAcademic Credential Translation Specialist

The Outcome

The certified translation was delivered with the long-form Julian-calendar phrasing preserved verbatim, every uncertain cursive name marked '[Illegible]' or '[Illegible: possibly ...],' the two family-confirmed readings (Vourliotes; Patra) recorded as confirmed in a Translator's Note, and the modern 2024 Eastern Samos certifying chain translated in full alongside the 19th-century act.

We apply the same approach on every pre-1923 Greek civil-registry record from the Julian-calendar period, and on every 19th- or early-20th-century handwritten European registry record where partial illegibility and a modern certifying chain coexist on the same page.