Converting a date string which is before 1970 into a timestamp in MySQL

Question

Not a very good title, so my apologies.

For some reason, (I wasn\'t the person who did it, i digress) we have a table structure where the field type for a date is va

Answer 1

convert these date strings into a unix time stamp

Traditional Unix timestamps are an unsigned integer count of seconds since 1-Jan-1970 therefore can't represent any date before that.