I Look Pretty Young But I'm Just Back-dated

[moon_custafer]

Due to having recently read a_t_rain's story the other day, I looked up John Heminges' name online and noticed that the Wikipedia entry gave his birth year as 1556, which would have made him thirty-two when he married Rebecca Knell who was sixteen at the time. Startled, I looked at some of the other dates given in the article: that birthdate would also have made him thirty-one at the time he qualified as a freeman of the Grocers' Company, even though he's described as having served a nine-year apprenticeship beginning age twelve.

Checking the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online got a birth year of 1566, which made way more sense, so I went into Wikipedia editing and fixed it (it actually had 1566 already in the header code, the typo was only in a few places).

Comments

[a_t_rain]

Ooh, thanks! I'd caught quite a while ago that there was a discrepancy between Wikipedia and other sources, and that 1566 seemed to be (pretty clearly) his actual birthdate, but it didn't occur to me that editing Wikipedia was ... something I could actually do? I guess, in my head, it's something you can only do if you have a user account and all kinds of knowledge about how not to step on other people's toes, and I have no idea if that's actually true or not.