Unusual historical date format

July 15, 2017 5:35 PM

A friend has a photo of relative from 1901, and both the birth and photo date (printed in the photo presumably from writing on the negative) are in the format dd/mm.yy - A stroke between day and month, and a dot between month and year. I couldn't find anything about that forat with some cursory googling. Has anybody encountered this format before or know anything about it?
posted by colin_l to Human Relations (4 answers total)

Response by poster: Sorry - misprint in the original, it's mm/dd.year 3/15.1812 and 10/15.1901
posted by colin_l at 5:37 PM on July 15, 2017

I strongly suspect the answer is simply this pre-dates the international agreements on dating formats?
posted by Wilder at 11:36 PM on July 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

also, (you sent me down the standards rabbithole) could this be someone who immigrated from Eastern Europe or the Caucuses? I say that because it looks like a mash-up of Western dd/mm/yyy
and Eastern dd.mm.yyyy styles
posted by Wilder at 11:41 PM on July 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

The is a lot of variation in international date formats, but I don't think any country has ever used a combination of two different date separators. That would lead me to suspect the two parts are actually recording separate things, but most likely it's just someone's quirky choice to write it that way.
posted by Lanark at 7:47 AM on July 16, 2017 [1 favorite]