Date

First, let’s start by looking at the date. It is important to know if the documents are talking about the same event in time. Is either document dated? If so, record your answers. If the documents do have dates, do the dates match?

Now compare what you found with this example.

What did we find? 

At first this is puzzling, as Captain Bowman’s journal merely says “5th,” and fails to specify what month or year like Clark’s entry does. But, if we look back several entries to the first entry for the month, we can see that Bowman seems to include the month on the first entry for the month and then just records the days in his later entries. By examining this further information, we can conclude that both men were describing events that took place on February 5th, 1779.