Why?!?! Finder shows wrong Created date

I've had an issue that's been driving me CRAZY for years with OS X, every version since I started with Tiger in 2005, and it's when I'm in Finder and, regardless of view choice (I prefer Column view), I see a Created date for a file of 12-31-1969. For example, I'll be scrolling through thumbnails of photos that were all taken on the same date and some will show the correct Created date and others will show this 12-31-1969 date. YET WHEN I VIEW THE SAME FILES IN LIGHTROOM, for example, all of them will show the corrected Created date. So it's like the EXIF data is correctly displayed in Lightroom for when the photo was taken (or the file "created") but not in Finder. Again, very frustrating, and I'd finally like a solution as to how to fix this in Finder. Right now I'm trying to manually sort photos into folders by year and I'm going nuts!

 

Sorry for the late reply - had a rather busy weekend. Anyhow, I remember reading a snippet somewhere about people who've moved files from Windows to Mac having this issue. And sure enough, anything from my pre-Mac days, 2004 and earlier, has this file created date, whether Word/Excel files and any manner of photo file. But it's more complicated than that. I have a bunch .PEF Pentax RAW and jpgs that have this same 12-31-1969 created date from before I had to move all my files from my Mac Mini to a new MacBook Pro in 2010. OS X didn't allow the whatever-it's-called feature (Sync?) to connect two Macs with Firewire to set up the new Mac, so I manually backed up all my files onto an external drive then copied them onto my new Mac. So those are the only 2 factors I can think of that cause Finder to be very irritating in this regard.