Jan 1, 1601 birthdays - is there a way to delete this?

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Jan 1, 1601 birthdays - is there a way to delete this?

I have many (hundreds) of contacts where I never entered a birthday but show up on my Apple Calendar with a January 1, 1601 birthday. The only way to deal with this seems to be to open EVERY SINGLE contact from contacts, then edit, then close. Some of them later come back with the same birthday. I only use Apple devices, this has moved along many phones and laptops. It stays inside the Calendar app on both devices. I'm losing my mind over this nagging problem.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jul 31, 2023 08:44 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

ajbinmpca

Level 1

10 points

Jul 8, 2024 07:06 PM in response to JerryCutini

Wow, others have the same problem I do!? This was frustrating me so much, I actually wrote an app to fix it, using ChatGPT to help. If this is of use, I can polish it a little bit and put it in the App Store… It would be my first such app submitted! — Atul

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Answer 2

JerryCutini Author

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10 points

Oct 31, 2023 12:49 PM in response to Recycleur

From what I've been able to determine, and I haven't put in the time you have, it seems if you add a contact anywhere, be it your iPhone or Outlook, if you only have a number and name and "Add Contact", it seems to default and add the birthday of 01/01/1601. I'd love to meet the Apple engineer that decided to use that as a default function. It makes no sense. I have >100 contacts like this and all of their birthdays are coming up. I have no idea what to get everyone and worse, I don't have an address for them!.. I love Apple BUT sometimes dumb/annoying things like this happen and there is no way to get a solution. Like eliminate all birthdays prior to 1800 when we had no electricity.

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Answer 3

444W

Level 1

12 points

Oct 30, 2023 06:51 PM in response to mario49

It's not that helpful to be told to simply remove all birthdays so that you lose the record of those from contacts you might wish to keep when the January 1, 1601 was an Apple default when the system was designed, I was told.

Why not just tell us how to get rid of that ridiculous setting?

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Answer 4

JerryCutini Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 31, 2023 12:50 PM in response to mario49

This solution does not work. I want to show all the correct birthdays, I simply do not want these that were autogenerated and honestly, illogical. All I can figure is that I have to go into every single contact and delete the birthday, which is massively tedious APPLE!

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Answer 5

Dec 26, 2023 10:55 AM in response to Recycleur

fixing them one at a time is a dreadful idea

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Answer 6

mario49

Community Specialist

Aug 1, 2023 07:37 AM in response to JerryCutini

Hello JerryCutini,

Thank you for reaching out to Apple Support Communities.

If you want to completely hide birthday calendar these steps should help:

"Show or hide the Birthdays calendar on Mac

The Birthdays calendar displays birthdays it finds in the Contacts app.

In the Calendar app on your Mac, choose Calendar > Settings, then click General.
Select or deselect “Show Birthdays calendar.”

You can’t add or remove birthdays directly in the Birthdays calendar; instead, you update them in the Contacts app. When you add or remove birthdays in Contacts, the Birthdays calendar is updated automatically.

If you add calendars from your Google account, a separate Birthdays calendar shows the birthdays for those friends and contacts."

Additional details can be found here: Show or hide the Birthdays calendar on Mac

If you would like to determine the cause, first we need to check to see how many accounts you are syncing with your calendar. Then check each one individually to see which one created the birthdates. Let us know the results.

Cheers!

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Answer 7

Recycleur

Level 4

1,627 points

Oct 31, 2023 01:08 PM in response to JerryCutini

I wonder why you shout at Apple when this seems to be squarely a Microsoft issue. Check these other posts also:

New Contacts: arbitrary birthday and anniversary of 1/1/1601 automatically added

01/01/1601 birthday/anniversary date automatically added to many contacts

It seems to go as far back as at least 2016.

Check your contacts in Outlook first.

Quote from one of the cited references:

If the birthday and anniversary of 1/1/1601 is present, the People Pane view of Outlook 2013 does not show the contact info. The view must be changed to List View, then open the contact , click on Details and delete the birthday and anniversary. Once done, the contact then shows correctly in the People Pane view of Outlook 2013.

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Answer 8

Recycleur

Level 4

1,627 points

Oct 31, 2023 12:29 PM in response to JerryCutini

Would you happen to have an Outlook account in the mix? I did a little research and found that.

01/01/1601 birthday/anniversary date automatically added...

I don't know if there's a durable solution though. I cannot test as I don't have that kind of account.

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Jan 1, 1601 birthdays - is there a way to delete this?

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