This month, the Bar Bulletin is focusing on Leap Year. As a Leap Year Baby, or Leapling myself, I have been dealing with Leap Year my whole life. Those of you not born on February 29th should consider yourself lucky. According to the web site leapyearday.com, there are approximately 200,000 Leap Year Day babies in the United States and about 4 million worldwide. And we all deal with interesting issues because of our birth date. For example, I was renting a car while I was on vacation and the service agent could not get the system to accept my driver’s license. It kept spitting back that my license was invalid. I asked her what she was typing into the system and she said that she was inputting the expiration date on my license, 2/29/2010. I told her to try typing 2/28/2010. When I last renewed my license, the person at the license bureau typed the expiration date as 2/29/2010, when 2010 is not a Leap Year. Recently, my medical insurance provider would not tell me why a claim was not granted. I had my ID number, but when I was asked for my birth date I told her 2/29 and she said, sorry, that isn’t what we have in the system so I can’t talk to you. I asked what date they did have and she said she couldn’t tell me. Eventually I discovered that someone had typed the date in as 2/28. But they wouldn’t change it. Only my employer could change the date. So as I said, consider yourself lucky that you have a normal birthday.

I said I was going to talk about Leap Year myths and folklore, but when I started investigating them I found that while there are some interesting myths surrounding Leap Year, there is little real support for those myths. For instance, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore,

“The dominant belief about leap year is that it is the only time that a woman many [sic] propose marriage to a man, rather than what was considered to be the natural order of things: the other way round. This was often called 'The Ladies' Privilege`. In previous times, when relationships between the sexes were more rigid and formal, there were a number of subsidiary beliefs surrounding the Ladies` Privilege. Some said it was only on Leap Year day that is 29 February that it was valid, while others believed that a man proposed to in this way could not refuse, except on substantial payment-a silk gown, or £ 100, and so on. Indeed, it was widely reported (erroneously) that there had been a Scottish Act of Parliament in the 13th century making this legally binding (see N&Q 7s:10 (1890), 188), or that it had passed into English Common Law (Courtship, Love and Matrimony (1606), quoted in N&Q 4s:8 (1871), 505). One story about the origin of the Ladies` Privilege is set in Ireland: St Bridget met St Patrick one day and complained that women did not have the right to propose. He offered the opportunity once in every seven years, but she bargained him down to one in four.”

I looked on the Internet and in online databases from my public library for other myths and kept coming back to this entry from the Dictionary of English Folklore. Everything I read indicated that it was the only authoritative source. But when I read the entry I could only think, but what are they quoting? I do not know about the rest of you, but I had no idea what N&Q 7s:10 (1890), 188 was and how this publication came to be the source for the entry. So I started investigating. It turns out that N&Q is a publication called Notes and Queries, published in England, now owned by the Oxford University Press, and begun in 1849. Its first issue, V.1 (1) of November 3, 1849, states that it is a “medium of inter-communication for literary men, artists, antiquaries, genealogists, etc.” This issue goes on to explain that “when found, make a note of” what you have read and where you read it. This is presumably so that in the future you will be able to recall it properly and not rely on your memory alone. “Half the lies that are current in the world owe their origin to a misplaced confidence in memory, rather than to intentional falsehood.” The purpose of the publication was to answer queries with reputable information, written down and cited properly.

Fascinating, I thought, but how do I access this publication? It is so old that certainly I won’t find it on the Internet. The Internet only contains current information, and if it does contain archived information it is only through a paid database. I found the current version of Notes & Queries at the oxfordjournals.org web site. I could even search it there for the references to “leap year.” But of course, once I found those references I needed to pay for each item on a “pay per article” basis. I thought, okay, I am right. I will not be able to actually look at those articles. But I kept searching and found a reference to “The Online Books Page,” which turns out to be a site maintained by the University of Pennsylvania. This site contains a list of archived serials and the web sites that host them, and included links to persistent archives of complete issues of Notes & Queries.  The web site address is: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=notesqueries. The journal is archived from 1849-1869 at an archive at Oxford and from 1870-1922 at the Internet Archives.

I found all the references to the Leap Year myths and folklore that had been mentioned, plus a couple more. And interestingly, these references themselves asked where they could find more about the “Ladies Privilege in Leap Year.” The citations they had did not seem to be valid, so how could they find the “Acts passed by the Scottish Parliament” to verify that this law had indeed been passed? It seems like we are always looking for more when we try to verify what has been done previously. But it is interesting to find out that my initial inclination to believe that I would not or could not find the references cited was incorrect. I COULD find Notes & Queries, but now I guess I need to find the Scottish laws. Hmm? Where should I start?