Set datepicker to extend back to the year 1800 - the UI is pretty streamlined for recent dates, more work would need to happen to get this datepicker to be easy to use for very old dates. Even with 1800, the user has to click the select control and then the oldest item once for each 10 years back in time from today, which as of today is about 21 times... Nonetheless, this can reasonably solve
bug #24698 for now, a more robust solution would server users better though.