A friend helped me realize I was unfortunately asking the wrong question. What I needed to do was choose the correct term when I ran get_the_terms. Since I wanted to display the year only I excluded any $term->name
which were not 4 characters long.
<?php
$terms = get_the_terms( $post->ID, 'From' );
if ( !empty( $terms ) ) {
foreach ( $terms as $term ){
if( ( 0 != $term->parent ) and ( strlen($term->name) == 4 ) )
$output = '<a href="' . get_term_link( $term ) .'">' . $term->name . '</a>';
}
if ( !empty( $output ) )
echo '<p><b>' . __('','From') . '</b> ' . $output . '</p>';
}
?>