title: Converting a date string which is before 1970 into a timestamp in MySQL
body: <p>Not a very good title, so my apologies.</p>
  
  <p>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 varchar. (odd).</p>
  
  <p>We have some dates, such as:</p>
  
  <pre><code>1932-04-01 00:00:00 and 1929-07-04 00:00:00
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I need to do a query which will convert these date strings into a unix time stamp, however, in mySQL if you convert a date which is before 1970 it will return 0.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks so much!</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: Wrong date format. ooops.</p>