Well Gents,
thanks for more ideas. I tried them all but to no avail.
Then out of sheer desperation i moved the documents from the sub folders to directly under the page with the archive. Lo and behold it worked. So that would explain the January 1970 since this is the default start date of the computer age. And since Reflect could not find the timeStamp value on the folders it was giving the default.
Adding depth and ignorefolders to the dittoparameters in the reflect call did no work. So i have to change this document structure:
articles (58)
category1
article1
article2
category2
article3
article4
to this structure:
articles (58)
article1
article2
article3
article4
Seems like an unnecessary Reflect limitation. Using categories to organize different articles should not interfere with the archiving.
Thanks to all who landed a hand.