These dates are stored as strings

What kinds of strings? "January 15, 1953" or "01/015/53" or "15/01/1953" or ...?

If the dates are stored as YYYYMMDD (e.g 1953-01-15 or 19530115 or 1953/01/15), then a simple perl sort of the array will put them in chronological order. If they aren't in that format, then you'll probably need to either munge them into that format or use a module like Date::Manip or Date::Calc.