How to find your birth time

The Ascendant, the angles and the houses of the chart depend on the time: the Ascendant changes sign roughly every two hours. Without the time these parts of the chart stay unknown. More on what is preserved in that case in the article a natal chart without a birth time.

1. Documents you hold and those held by relatives. Sometimes the time is given in a discharge summary from the maternity hospital, the child’s medical record, a vaccination certificate or a certificate confirming the birth. The birth certificate itself usually does not state the time, but it is worth checking.
2. Family records. Baby albums, diaries, letters, greeting cards, calendar entries — parents often noted the time of birth.
3. Relatives’ accounts. Ask your mother, father, grandmothers and grandfathers. Indirect landmarks are useful too: “it was getting light”, “after lunch”, “the night shift”.
4. The maternity hospital or hospital. In many countries medical archives keep records of births; the request is made by the person or their representative, and the procedure and retention periods depend on the country and the institution.
5. Registration authorities. In some countries the time of birth is entered in the birth record or in an extended extract from it. Find out whether you can request a full copy of the record.

• A document is more reliable than a recollection, and a record made on the day of birth is more reliable than a later one.
• Times in documents are often rounded to five, fifteen or thirty minutes. That is normal: we check an exact time over a span of ±2 minutes and mark as unknown whatever changes within it.
• If sources disagree, write down both versions and enter in the form an approximate time with a span that covers them.
• Remember the time zone and daylight saving time: a document gives the local time, and the site will convert it itself by the rules of that year.

In the form choose “Approximately”, give the time and the deviation — from ±15 minutes to ±2 hours. The narrower the span, the more parts of the chart will be known. For example, “around 8 in the morning, give or take half an hour” almost always gives the Moon sign, and often the Ascendant too.

We do not “calculate” the birth time from events in a person’s life — such rectification requires a separate method, which the reading does not have. If the time is completely unknown, choose “Don’t know”: the chart will be built from the known factors without any guessing.

Before you buy, the chart can simply be built again with the new time. For a reading you have bought there is one free correction of the data for the same person, with no time limit. How it works is described on the help page.

When the data is ready, build a chart. If the time never turned up, take a look at the article a natal chart without a birth time — it explains what can be found out without it.