Evolution (ews) does not show Birthday and Anniversary when date is before 1970-01-01
When viewing contact items the fields for Birthday and Anniversary shows text "None" although the date is viewable by Outlook. Tracing the soup communication when downloading the contacts from exchange server to evolution you can see, that the dates are transmitted. This behaviour can be seen with "evolution 3.40.0-1" and "evolution 3.36.5-0ubuntu1" (other versions I have not tested).
If you do a "EWS_DEBUG=2 /usr/libexec/evolution-addressbook-factory -w &>log.txt" after erasing the .cache/evolution/addressbook, you can see entries like "<t:Birthday>1949-05-23T11:59:00Z</t:Birthday>". Looking at the evolution GUI you'll see the text "None" instead of the transmitted date. If you look in the sqlite3 cache.db, table ECacheObjects in column ECacheOBJ you will not find a "BDAY:" entry for that contact although it has been sent (see soup log).