The problem almost every family runs into
A family sits down to arrange the shraddh and finds it has exactly one piece of information: the English date on the death certificate. The 14th of March. The 2nd of November. Nobody wrote down the tithi, the elder who used to keep it in his head is himself gone, and the relatives who might have known are scattered. So the family does the reasonable-sounding thing and marks the same English date every year.
This is not a small mistake and it is not a shameful one either. It happens in most households now, and it happens because nobody ever explained the calendar plainly. This article does that. By the end of it you should be able to take an English date of death and arrive at the tithi your family is meant to observe — or know exactly whom to ask.
Keep one thing in mind while you read. Shraddh is a duty owed to those who came before us, not an occasion of mourning. Getting the day right is part of doing the duty carefully, the same way one would be careful about any obligation to an elder.
Two calendars are running at once, and they do not match
The English calendar on your wall is a solar calendar. It counts the earth's journey around the sun, which takes a little over 365 days, and its months are simply fixed blocks of that year. The Hindu calendar counts something else entirely — the moon. A month runs from one new moon to the next, and that cycle is roughly twenty-nine and a half days, not thirty or thirty-one.
Twelve lunar months therefore come to about 354 days — some eleven days short of the solar year. That shortfall is why a lunar date cannot sit on the same English date year after year. It slides backward by roughly eleven days each year, and then an extra month, the adhik maas, is inserted every few years to pull the two calendars back into step. This is also why Holi and Diwali and every other festival move around your English calendar instead of staying put.
Nobody expects Diwali to fall on the same English date every year. The shraddh tithi behaves in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason. Once you see that, the whole thing stops being mysterious.
What a tithi is, and what paksha means
A tithi is not a day of the week and not a date in the ordinary sense. It is a stage of the moon's growth or decline. The lunar month is divided into thirty such stages, fifteen while the moon waxes and fifteen while it wanes, and they carry the familiar names — Pratipada, Dwitiya, Tritiya, and so on up to Purnima on the bright side and Amavasya on the dark side.
Those two halves are the paksha. Shukla paksha is the bright fortnight, when the moon is growing toward the full moon. Krishna paksha is the dark fortnight, when it is shrinking toward the new moon. This is the part families most often lose, and losing it is costly, because every tithi name occurs twice in a month — once in each paksha. Saying Saptami is not enough. Krishna paksha Saptami and Shukla paksha Saptami are two different days, about a fortnight apart.
So the answer you are looking for always has three parts, never one: the lunar month, the paksha, and the tithi. Ashwin Krishna Chaturthi is a complete answer. Chaturthi by itself is not.
The shraddh is performed on the tithi, not on the English anniversary
The rite is tied to the tithi on which the person departed, and to that tithi in every year that follows. This is what the shastra prescribes and what every purohit will ask you for. The English date served one purpose only: it recorded the moment. The tithi is what the observance is actually built on.
A family that observes the English date instead is not being irreverent — it simply has the wrong instrument. In most years that English date will fall on some other tithi altogether, and on the year the two happen to coincide it will be by accident. The good news is that correcting it does not require undoing anything. You find the tithi once, and from that year onward the family observes the right day.
The method: going from the English date to the tithi
The method is short, and the one step people get wrong is the year. Take the exact English date of death — the death certificate has it, and that is the one document nearly every family does keep. Note the year on it carefully. Then open a panchang or Hindu calendar for that same year, not for this year, and look up that date. It will tell you the lunar month, the paksha and the tithi prevailing on that day. That combination is your shraddh tithi, and it is what you observe every year thereafter.
Looking it up in this year's calendar is the commonest error. This year's calendar tells you which tithi falls on that English date now, which is a different question and usually a different answer. It must be the panchang of the year the death occurred.
Two other routes are worth trying before anything else. Many households wrote the tithi into a diary, a bahi, the back of a photograph or a note kept with the papers — it is worth one honest search. And the family purohit, the one who conducted the antyeshti or the twelfth-day rites, very often has it written in his own register. A phone call there can settle the matter in a minute.
Why two panchangs can show the tithi on different days
A tithi does not begin at midnight and it is not twenty-four hours long. It starts and ends at whatever clock time the moon reaches that stage, which means a tithi can begin in the afternoon of one day and end in the morning of the next. It can run for twenty hours or for twenty-six.
So when a tithi covers parts of two English days, which of the two is the shraddh day? The rule is that the tithi prevailing at the time of day relevant to the rite is the one taken. Shraddh is performed in the aparahna, the afternoon portion of the day, so the tithi standing at that time is the tithi observed. This is settled practice, not a matter of preference.
This is also why two panchangs can put the same tithi on days that differ by one. Sunrise and the length of the afternoon depend on where you are, and different panchangs are computed for different reference places and by slightly different reckonings. Neither is being careless. If you find such a difference, follow the panchang your family or your purohit has always followed, and stay with that one rather than switching each year.
The awkward cases, stated honestly
Death after midnight but before sunrise. Give the exact local date, time and place. Although a panchang day is reckoned from sunrise, the death tithi is the tithi prevailing at the actual moment of death. Do not automatically take the tithi shown at the previous sunrise: it may have changed overnight. Ask the purohit to check the tithi boundaries for that moment.
A tithi that is skipped that year. Because tithis are shorter than a day, one can begin after sunrise and end before the next sunrise, so that no day belongs to it. This is called a kshaya tithi, and in that year your tithi simply does not appear on the calendar. The rite is not cancelled — it is not dropped and not moved to the English date. The purohit assigns the day by the accepted rule, generally the day on which that tithi was current during the aparahna. Ask; do not decide this one yourself.
A tithi that spans two days, or comes twice. The other side of the same coin: a tithi long enough to touch two sunrises appears against both days in the calendar, and occasionally a tithi is counted on two consecutive days. The aparahna rule above decides it. Where the family is unsure, one call to the purohit fixes the day, and it stays fixed for that year.
When only the month is remembered — or nothing at all
Sometimes the family remembers only that it happened around Sawan, or in the cold, or a few days after a particular festival. That is more useful than it sounds. Combine it with anything else that survives — a hospital bill, a bank letter, an old passport, a mention in a court or property paper, the year of a photograph — and you can often narrow it to one lunar month. From there a purohit can advise how to fix a day. Many families in this position settle on the Amavasya of that month for the yearly observance.
And when nothing is remembered at all — no date, no month, no year, as happens with great-grandparents and with ancestors two or three generations back — the tradition has already provided for it. Sarva Pitru Amavasya, the last day of Pitru Paksha, is the day appointed for every ancestor whose tithi is unknown, forgotten or missed. It covers the whole line at once. A separate article on this site explains that day and how families observe it.
So an unknown tithi never leaves a family without a way to perform the rite. It only changes which day the tradition points you to.
Ask rather than guess — and then write it down
If the family cannot work the tithi out on its own, a Gayawal Tirth Purohit can do it from the English date. Give him the exact date of death, the year, and the time of day if the papers show it — and mention the place, since sunrise differs from one city to another. Working back through the panchang of that year is ordinary work for him and takes little time.
What should be said plainly is this: guessing is worse than asking. A tithi picked because it sounds about right, or because a cousin thinks he remembers, or because the English date is easier to keep, becomes the family's tithi for the next fifty years — and every year after that repeats the same error. One question, asked once, settles it permanently. There is nothing embarrassing about not knowing; most families who come to Gaya arrive with exactly this gap.
Once you have it, do the next generation the favour nobody did for you. Write it in full — lunar month, paksha and tithi — with the English date and year of death beside it, and keep it where the family papers are kept. Send it to your brothers and sisters and children. Two lines written down now save your grandchildren this entire search.