What gives SqlDateTime 0001-08-01 00:00:00

Somehow I made the SQLDateTime 0001-08-01 00:00:00. That also becomes year 1, month 8, day 1.
What illogic of mine would give me this?

you certainly stored zero in the sqldate

Thanks. For some reason I did have a field used for SqlDate as “0”.

Found the answer. I keep some important data in the first line of my CSV files. It includes as the first element the creationdate in SQLDate. I also put a Unicode BOM there and I hadn’t updated this one piece of code that took off BOM regardless of the existence. Grumble.